Read Me First! A Style Guide for the Computer Industry (2nd Edition)

As I read the other reviews, I think many readers don't realise that this type of book is a guide, a "getting started" reference, to help your tech pubs department develop its own customised style guide. We have taken the best ideas here, the best ideas from Digital and the best ideas from MS, and have created a style manual for our particular business, geared to the educational level and computer experience of our customers. Read Me First! contributed more ideas than the other books because it has a broader world view. The MS manual assumes that the reader is planning to work at MS doing MS-distributed documents.

As a bonus, Read Me First! includes a CD-ROM with the FrameMaker templates used to construct the book. This was a great boon to our company. We were just converting from MS Weird to FrameMaker and were considering contractors to build templates for us. Instead, we saved money and time by not having to start at ground level. We were able to tweak the templates and get the results we needed in a very short time.

We are eagerly awaiting an update to this manual to see what other great ideas they've come up with since the first printing.


A good book gets even better in 2nd edition   August 1, 2003
 11 out of 11 found this review helpful

The first edition of this style guide was good, especially if you wanted an alternative to the Microsoft Manual of Style, but this edition is even better. It covers a wider range of issues (for example, adding much information about writing online material), and covers them very well. In fact, the book goes a bit beyond style in an appendix on developing a publications department, but the topics covered are certainly relevant and valuable, so I'm glad they were included. I don't always agree with the style choices, but that's irrelevant; I've never seen any style guide I completely agree with. Overall, I'm so impressed with this book, I'm likely to use it as a textbook for teaching technical editors. As you can tell, I'm giving it the "highly recommended" stamp.


excellent chapter about documents with links   September 13, 2005
 8 out of 8 found this review helpful

Sun offers a style sheet for technical writers. These suggestions are used by Sun in its documents and are a very clean and internally consistent guide. Of course, it is not restricted to descriptions of Sun's products. A lot of care has gone into the guide.

Plus, the suggestions are not just for printed documents. Nowadays, a lot is expressed in languages with links, like HTML or PDF, and the advice pertains here too.

For illustrations, you are shown how to display interactable icons differently from non-interactable images. Subtleties, to be sure. But taking these into consideration makes for a clean document.

On the subject of documents with links, a chapter has cogent suggestions on the proper usage. Like avoiding overlinking, which is a common flaw amongst writers new to this. Also avoid linking with anchor text that is generic, like "click this". Instead, use more descriptive strings to help search engines classify the document that is pointed to. Assuming that both documents will be on the Web. But even if not, they might still be in your internal corporate web, and you might have an internal search engine spidering these. The strings will help the engine better classify both documents. This chapter may be the most vital of the book.


A good basic text for initiating a style guide   May 5, 1999
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

While I agree with another reviewer that this book is boring, I'm not convinced that a guideline for how to set up a style guide is supposed to be sexy, exciting reading. The book does a credible job of discussing the basics and goes into excruciating detail on the mechanics such as punctuation and capitalization. The focus on words commonly used in the computer industry differentiates it from Strunk & White and other books on grammar and elements of style. For a new tech writing department just starting out with a need for "rules" and guilelines, I recommend this book.