> Perhaps that's a reflection of the book's contents? When I was told that > Springer would not hire a professional indexer and I had to do it myself, I > made it my business to quickly learn how and to do the best darn job of it > that could possibly be done. As far as I'm concerned, a technical book is > worthless without an outstanding index. After I went through the text > several times marking index entries, I then did it again very slowly asking > myself what other word or phrase someone could possibly use that would never > occur to me (the author and subject matter expert). _That_ took a long time > and a lot of effort, but I considered it crucial to the success of the book. > > I think of index creation as a major part of what I own the purchaser and > reader. If I want the reader to think well of my and my published effort > then I need to make the information accessible for everyone. So, if I was > writing a book about using a desktop computer I'd probably have two entries > for the optical media drive: "cdrom/dvd drive" and "cup holder." > > There's a very useful book on SQLite that has the worst index I've ever > seen in a technical reference. I ended up buying the PDF version of the book > because I can search that within xpdf for information that's not in the > index. The author did not write the index so he's not to blame. >
Please excuse my completely OT post, but that was very insightful. I love to read, especially coursework (yes, I am a nerd) and I never realized how much effort must go into the index. I simply never thought about that. Thank you for the insight into that technical bit that I've appreciated and cursed at times over the years, without ever really understanding the effort behind it until now. -- Dotan Cohen http://what-is-what.com http://gibberish.co.il
