Eliot Kimber has just published DITA for Practitioners Volume 1: Architecture and Technology, which is the first of two books he is publishing about the DITA standard. Volume 1 begins with a hand-on explanation of end-to-end DITA processing that will get you up and running fast, followed by an overview of the DITA architecture.

Inside the Book: 

This article by Tony Self, titled "Can you explain that again? DITA for beginners", was published in tcworld, March 2011, and is re-published with permission.

Abstract: DITA is a difficult thing to explain to the uninitiated. It is difficult because we expect it to be a product or a technology, when it is actually a standard and a methodology. DITA provides an approach to technical writing that embraces best practice ideals such as modularity, single-sourcing, and content re-use. The reasons for moving to DITA are business-focused.