Hi Pam,

JoAnn's Arbortext Edition of the Introduction to DITA has essentially the same content as the original Linton and Bruski version, but all the examples in the Arbortext editon can be done with Arbortext in WYSIWYG mode.

The original edition expects you to edit the XML files. You learn a lot more about DITA this way, but it's not for every tech writer.

I said this in a review of the Arbortext version:

All the great content from the original edition is there, but many illustrations are now screenshots from Arbortext Editor. Instead of the XML markup code for examples, you see the tags-on view in Arbortext Editor. A new section (Lesson 1) describes context-sensitive editing. Allowable elements that can be inserted depend on the location of your insertion point in the DITA document. Element entry automatically adds the appropriate start and end tags. Lesson 9 introduces the Arbortext Map Editor, with its Resource Manager to locate topic files and a Relationship Tables visual editing interface. Lesson 21 covers Arbortext's powerful Profiling approach to conditional processing. That said, this book has a strange metaphysical quality of being about itself. You are reading a line that describes the steps in a task and you suddenly realize that the very same steps were needed to generate the printed words you are looking at! It's a self-referential reference book. This book is not just about DITA. It is DITA. Talk about practicing what you preach. Everyone starting out with DITA should read this book.

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We have put all the files from JoAnn's docset on a website, where you can practice editing your first DITA topics, and then build them out as web (XHTML), print (PDF), and Help (Eclipse).

You can serve the results from your own workspace folder on the web to show your colleagues. Or you can download them for use in your own work environment.

Take a look at http://www.ditausers.org

Bob Doyle