Shorter is better... and harder.

02/16/2006

Nate Schutta thinks the upcoming Practices of an Agile Developer is a ” ...joy to read. Unlike some tomes that drone on and on, PaD presents material in easy to digest chunks of 2-5 pages making it particularly approachable for those of us with limited contiguous reading time.”

When writing, it’s a lot easier to drone on in a long, tedious book—and since publishers can basically set the price of a book based on page count, there’s a lot of incentive to write long, thick, heavy books.

Last time I was at Borders, I noticed an awful lot of these 3-4” thick books. That’s just ridiculous. I know I don’t have the time to plow though that much of an ill-considered book. If it’s a reference book, that’s one thing, but for tutorial/explanatory style books, that’s just way too much.

Some of the most powerful books we publish are the shortest—Behind Closed Doors tells you what you need to know to be an effective team lead or project manager. In about 160 pages. The best book on how to manage your career and improve your job is only about 180 pages or so.

Yeah, it’s harder to write a book that reads like a rich, finely reduced chef’s sauce. But who wants to slog through yet another canned-stock watery mess?