The Rockley Group Releases New Book - DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers

This announcement was prepared by The Rockley Group

The Rockley Group (TRG) is pleased to announce the release of DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers. DITA 101 is specifically designed for authors, managers and all those who want or need to understand DITA, but don't need to deal with code, tags and related implementation details right now.

DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is the topic-based architecture and approach to creating a variety of types of content using XML that is fast becoming the foundation for content creation from technical documentation, to marketing materials, to general business documents.

"We often work with clients who are looking at DITA, or are in the beginning stages of a DITA implementation" says Ann Rockley, President of the Rockley Group, "and we keep answering the same questions; what is DITA, how do we write in a DITA environment, how does DITA work?"

There is a lot of good in-depth information about DITA available, but nothing that looks at it from a high level and ties it all together in an understandable and readable format. Many books and websites can tell you a lot about DITA, but either they simply restate the standard definition of DITA or they quickly delve into the technical aspects of DITA and leave many beginners behind. As Scott Abel (The Content Wrangler) says: "The resources available are often poorly conceived, confusing, jargon-laden collections of information that don't make learning new skills and techniques easy. In fact, they make things much harder than they need be. That's why DITA 101 by Ann Rockley, Steve Manning and Charles Cooper is such an important work."

"We didn't want to show reams of code or detailed content, heavy on syntax, but low on context", said Ann Rockley. "And frankly, with today's tools, you don't have to understand the code to create DITA-based content. We wanted to provide an easy to digest primer on DITA that contains background and contextual information, as well as helping the reader actually understand how DITA works and how all the pieces fit together."

TRG has taken its years of experience helping organizations to move to DITA and distilled it into an easy to read and understand format. Combined with their expertise in developing effective reuse strategies and adopting content management, this book covers everything you need to know to understand DITA from an authors' or managers' viewpoint. If you need to get a handle on DITA, what it's about, how it works and how you and your organization can benefit from it, but don't want to wade through technical specifications; then this is the book for you.

Available in Trade Paperback format or PDF download at Lulu.com. For more information, or to download a sample chapter (Chapter 3 - Reuse: Today's best practice) visit the book website at www.DITA101.com.

About The Rockley Group

The Rockley Group has an international reputation for developing customer-centric enterprise content component management strategies and underlying information architecture. For more than 15 years The Rockley Group has assisted organizations to select the right technology and develop an effective component-based content management strategy.

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