"Dummies" books (was Re: New 6.0 Features - Sell what you got fellas)

[Bill Vermillion]

Nancy Palmquist, the prominent pundit, on Tue, Oct 26 10:45  while half 
mumbling half-witicized: 

> Fairlight wrote:
> >Is it just me, or did Kenneth Brody say:
> >
> >>"Jay R. Ashworth" wrote:
> >>
> >>>On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 04:36:05PM -0400, Bill Vermillion wrote:
> >>
> >>[...]
> >>
> >>>>And my personal bias is that I hate anything that has DUMMIES
> >>>>in the title.
> >>>
> >>>Though, ironically, they're pretty passable, believe it or not.

> >I got OO Programming for Dummies. What a waste. I -looked-
> >(at the store) at "Java for Dummies". It really should have
> >been titled, "Stealing other people's applets and seasoning to
> >taste".

> I have to add that the normal Computer Phobes like the "BLAH
> for DUMMIES" series of books. They don;t feel threatened by the
> normal level of computer related books.

The first thing to do is get them over their fear/phobia about
computers.  They are not magic - but I've seen many who are afraid
of them.

> Programmers as a rule write very bad books. It is hard for them
> to make a concept understandable to normal people.

My view has been that once the computer industry took hold a lot of
writers/journalists started writing about technology they did not
understand.

I got into a heated email exchange with an editor of a technical
mag who was learning Unix as he went and was writing columns on it.
He passed along WRONG information from readers as if it were his.
He did NOT bother to check.  One problem in the industry is that
the 'technical editor' - who checks to make sure stories are
accurate - does not seem to exist anymore.

I also saw similar things in another technical trade publication
where an author berated a piece of equipment because it 
did things YYY and not XXX.

One extremly knowledgable person took him to task sayin that YYY
was the correct way.  Letters to the editor went on for about 3
issues before the publisher stopped printing them - as it was 
quite clear the magazine was in the wrong and didn't want to start
losing advertisers.

The problem in reading the magazine and books is you really have to
know something about the technology to be able to understand what
the person is saying and to JUDGE whether they know what they are
talking about.  

> I think it is incomprehensible to them that everyone does not 
> know something they find so simple.  It is an arrogance that is very 
> basic to books and training in this industry.

The problems I saw were that popular authors were competing against
each other to be first/cute/important - and forgot their function
was to inform and educate the readers.

Why did this happen. MONEY  MONEY  MONEY  MONEY  MONEY MONEY.

> I think in a small way, they like people to think them
> all-knowing, and tell the end user that they could not
> understand this or that.

Good authors don't do that.  But writers who are contracted to
write XXXX for Dummies [not picking on that title but all of
the quicky books] are up against contractual deadlines for the
publisher to get the publication to market.   Again - it is writers
who are trying to be technical - not technical people who are
trying to write.  There are too few of the latter - but what they
do write is technially excellent and usually have enough to explain
the smaller details.

> I have a philosophy that is quite different. I like the
> end-user of my applications to have some power. I like them to
> be able to use the selection screens, change the browse formats
> and get familiar to some degree with filePro. It is such a
> enabling thing to be able to generate a list or find some data
> by yourself.

That really has nothing to do with books/magazine/manuals.
You approach is excellent.  And the end  users should always know
as much as they can.

I have had problems with some users where things are clear >if<
they would read the screen.  They tend to memorize keystrokes,
and if they ever make a mistake they wind up somewhere that they
don't recognize, and instead of taking the time to see what is on
the screen the first thing they do is call for help.

There is almost nothing you can do help those.

> I remember when I started with Windows and I looked all over
> for a definition of "system tray". Never did find one but
> all the books assume that I knew what it was. That kind of
> basic information is missing and causes users much grief and
> frustration. (Please don't post a definition - I got it figured
> out.)

I do believe things like that were covered in the manuals that
used to come with Windows.  In the early Windows you usually got
two 5.25x8" soft cover manuals of about 250 pages each. But when
the manufacturers found that most people never opened them, they
stopped providing them.  The 'help' system in the MS system
are mere skeletons of the original documentation.

> If a person has basic skill in logic (Geometry class seems to
> be the best indicator - not math or algrebra), they can have
> success with filePro. A very basic skill and many people are
> surprised to find they have the gene.

I don't know that geometry has a lot to do with logic at least from
my POV.  I'd think algebra requires more logical thinking.
And what is that you define as 'math'.   That's almost as
broad as 'computing'.

And for a bit of trivia.  The Greeks invented geometry but
they had no mathematical/numerical skills except as related to
geometry.

To multiply two numbers they would draw an angle, and mark
divisions.  To multiple 3 by 7, the would count 7 marks on one line
and 1 on the other and draw a line.  Then they would move to the
3rd mark on the line with the 1, and draw a line parallel to
the line connecting 1 and 7, and then count the number of marks
where the new line intersected.

One reason so many people flunked the class that I learned about
that, was the instructor was head of both the mathematics
department and the astronomy department.  And he was the typical
absent minded professor who might take 5 days to get to the test we
were going to have 'tomorrow'. He'd forget it about for 3 days
until the end of class, and on day 4 he'd remember it, and go get
the test, and come back because he couldn't find it.

But we learned about greek fire, damascus steel, and how the
Greeks multiplied.  And we all passed the two questions he put on
the final.  The problem was there were 50 math instructors and 
each contributed two questions.

> Sometimes you have to get past the phobe that they are bad at
> math, a legecy of a poor education system that needs revision
> to actually train people to think not regurgitate.

The current teaching mode so often seems to be to teach the
students to 'pass the test'.

And in one of Feynman's books he tells about teaching in South
America for a year.  The students wrote down everything he said
verbatim - but they never asked questions.  That struck him as odd.
They could parrot what he said but did not neccesarily understand -
otherwise they would have asked questions.

If you don't recognize the name Feynman, he was one of probably
the top-50 physicists of the 20th century.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com