Comtech Services' Introduction to DITA has been produced in a new version featuring PTC Arbortext Editor and Styler.

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. You see the Document Map (structure view) and Edit View.

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.

The extensive coverage of the DITA Open Toolkit is gone, as publishing is now done with XSL in Styler (Lessons 22 to 25).

Once again, the steps in each task in this book are themselves DITA tasks which are then published to create the book, presumably with Styler. I am surprised that the excellent page headings that told you which Part you were in were dropped. I would like to see Part and Lesson number at the top of every page.

As I said in my review of the original edition, "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.

Buy it today.