I mentioned how ebooks would be ideal for technical information, but I haven't explained what sort of information I have been in mind. I am specifically thinking of just-in-time information, packaged in small ebooks that cover a narrow topic. Here's a concrete example. Let's assume that I want to set up a website for a small IT consulting business. I do my research, pick a webhosting company, and sign up for a hosting plan along with a domain name. Next comes the task of designing and putting up the website. I'll leave the designing part to my artistic side and focus on the technical "putting up the website" part here. I decide that I'd go for database-driven content, specifically a site based on PHP and MySQL. Since there are many PHP–MySQL open-source content management systems (CMS) around, I do some research again and even try out some of these CMS at opensourceCMS.com and then pick Drupal as my CMS of choice. I read Drupal's online handbook and, following those instructions, download the Drupal tarball, install it at my hosting site, and soon I have an empty Drupal website that looks something like this:
Now comes the fun part, I need to add content, but I don't know all the details of Drupal to get moving quickly. I add the administrator account and do some configuring and then start reading the online help, but it's slow going because I don't I fully understand terms such as block, node, taxonomy, vocabulary, and so on. I know I'll eventually figure it out and then I can drop the website content into the Drupal CMS and have the website ready to roll, but if I could get my hands on a small ebook, perhaps no more than 100 pages, that explained the basic principles of Drupal and walked me through the steps involved in creating a few typical websites in Drupal, then I'd certainly be willing to pay $7-10 for the ebook. It'd be even more appealing to me, if, instead of just text and some static screenshots, the ebook included animations to show exactly which field to change for a task and the result of that change on the website's appearance. To see if the ebook is appropriate, I'd like to browse the table of content and perhaps 5 to 10 pages of material. I'll be looking for some real knowledge, not just a rehash of installation steps. That's the kind of just-in-time technical information I want to see in ebooks that I'd be willing to pay for :-)
Tags: books ebooks epublishing drupal php mysql cms justintime opensource
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