On Friday, 02/19/2010 at 03:33 EST, Shane <[email protected]> wrote: > And I have always considered the Redbooks to have (to some degree) the > imprimatur of IBM - and hence elevated credence. > Surely this is why IBM offers (er, offered ?) residencies at all ?.
The IBM development paradigm is that we document what the product *does*. How it operates, what the interfaces do, what messages it generates, etc. IBM product documentation is relatively poor (IMO) at explaining how to tie it all together and make it *accomplish* something, not just sit there and look pretty. It has been the ITSO that has traditionally tried to fill that gap and provide a point-in-time look at how to be productive and not waste *too much* time reading books and inferring the blueprint. The whole blind-men-and-the-elephant thing. It should come as no surprise that this actually helps people adopts the new technology faster, and *that* has an effect on the bottom line. They are snapshots of the technology, meant to explain and encourage use of new things. But they are not product publications and can quickly get out of date. It is relatively rare have both the funding and an interested author who is willing to update and re-publish a Redbook. We have been lucky with Mike & Co. and the ITSO up to now. But the free ride, as it were, had to come to come to an end eventually. > One only has to look at the change in emphasis in the residencies over > the last few years to ascertain where IBM apparently sees its future > business coming from. Every year the ITSO sends out a request for ideas. They select ideas from the list and schedule Residencies, produce Redpapers, or update existing Redbooks, They have to balance the number of projects with their size, complexity, and the availability of authors and the resources (e.g. machines), not to mention funding. When belts are tight, the ITSO has to make tough decisions. But I suspect that the ITSO is not done with the Cookbooks and that, like Frosty the Snowman, they will returrn to us some day with a new set of Cookbooks. But I think it would be Way Coolerl if the ITSO could simply update the Wiki. Alan Altmark z/VM Development IBM Endicott ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
