Cut the duplication

As I mentioned in the About section of this blog, I have about 6 feet of books on software development, probably something like 30,000 pages!

Obviously I haven't read every word of any of these books, and can often pick up the information I need by skimming chapters or just using the books for rererence. However, I often miss out complete chapters because they are on topics which are already covered in more detail in other books. For example, most books on ASP .NET will have one or more chapters on the C# language, SQL Server and database design etc. I often find that a third or even as much as a half of each book covers topic areas I already know about.

This adds to the size and cost of the book, and gives the reader more work just trying to pick out the bits they actually need. It really isn't sensible to try to pack into one book - even if it does have more than a thousand pages - everything people need to know to do a particular job.

So please, publishers, just keep your books focused, and if somebody needs to read up on another related technology they can buy another book. That way we, the readers, get smaller and cheaper books, and you, the publishers, will actually get to sell more books.