A DITA & DITA Open Toolkit Reading List

I was in the process of reor­ga­niz­ing my com­put­er sci­ence and tech­ni­cal writ­ing shelf today dur­ing lunch when I began to notice a pat­tern: I have quite a few books relat­ed to DITA and the under­ly­ing tech­nolo­gies of the DITA Open Toolk­it. Well, this isn’t by coin­ci­dence. It’s a big part of my job and some­thing I’m real­ly inter­est­ed in. But it occurred to me just how much time I’ve spent pour­ing through these texts of struc­tured author­ing and XML-based technology—all in hopes of grokking this for my job.

So, in no par­tic­u­lar order, here’s a list of some of my books on the subject:

DITA

• Prac­ti­cal DITA
  by Julio Vazquez
• DITA 101
  by Ann Rock­ley, Charles Coop­er, & Steve Manning
• The DITA Style Guide: Best Prac­tices for Authors
  by Tony Self (Kin­dle edition)

XML

• Learn­ing XML, Sec­ond Edi­tion by Erik Ray1
• XML in a Nut­shell, Third Edi­tion by Elliot Harold & W. Scott Means
• XML Pock­et Ref­er­ence (Pock­et Ref­er­ence (O’Reil­ly)) by Simon St. Lau­rent & Michael Fitzgerald
• Learn­ing XSLT by Michael Fitzgerald
• XSLT: Pro­gram­mer’s Ref­er­ence (Pro­gram­mer to Pro­gram­mer) by Michael Kay
• XSL-FO by Dave Pawson
• SVG Essen­tials by J. David Eisen­berg (free at O’Reil­ly Commons)
• CSS: The Defin­i­tive Guide by Eric Meyer

A cou­ple of books on Ant & JavaScript that I haven’t even got­ten to yet:

• Learn­ing JavaScript, 2nd Edi­tion by Shel­ley Powers
• Ant: The Defin­i­tive Guide, 2nd Edi­tion by Steve Holzner

And, some wider shots of my (sort of) orga­nized bookshelves:

1. I have the first edi­tion. I’d rec­om­mend get­ting the lat­er edi­tion. [↩]