Customer comments on this selection.
 There is a better book available
In addition to this book, I also bought "Standards for Online Communication," (SFOC) by J. Hackos & D. Stevens. As of this writing, I've read much of both books. Is the Help Helpful? seems to have taken it's material from SFOC. SFOC is more thorough and therefore easier (for me) to understand. If you are creating online help, go with SFOC.
 Excellent synopsis of the help development process
This book brings together many aspects of writing technical documentation, with the specific focus of writing online help. It's like "Managing Your Documentation Projects" (Hackos, 1994), but for online help projects, without assuming a large doc department or heavy-weight processes. The first chapter summarizes the help development process as an introduction to planning a project, including the benefits and pitfalls of each step. The later chapters each focus on a specific phase, task, or issue in the process. I'm perplexed by the complaints of "Unhappy Buyer" about the task-oriented headings and bullet points in "Is the Help Helpful?", as I found those to be among the most helpful features of this book.
The book does not assume you are using any particular help technology or help authoring tools (though these are summarized in an appendix). So, for example, while Chapter 6 covers issues in producing a table of contents and index, you may need to refer to other sources for instructions in how to implement them with the specific technology and tool you are using.
Many of the topics covered in this book are addressed in greater depth in other books; an appendix offers a list of references for further reading. To really understand all these issues, you would need to read several books. However, you could read all those other books, and still not get the focus on online help offered by this one.
Truly awful "book"
I think the author was trying to be funny when she wrote this supposed 'book.' I am a novice when it comes to authoring help systems, and as I read through this book I could not figure out why I wasn't understanding much. After much consideration, I realized that the headings in this book are resembling headings for a help system, in that they are mostly gerunds. This wouldn't be such a problem if beneath the headings, the author would actually have written paragraphs explaining the material. Instead, most of the content in the book is bulleted--as if they were steps you'd follow in a procedure!! To say the least, this book is disjointed. It is not for people seeking to learn about writing help systems.
 for writers and programmers
Online help is a wonderful thing when well done. But how to achieve this? This is different from a standard programming problem, when one might be implementing an algorithm incorrectly or inefficiently. There are various ways to test for these. But when it comes to determining the usefulness of a given corpus of online help associated with a program, then we get into intangibles. Weber helps us along, by showing how you can use procedures to evaluate from your users how relevant they perceive the help to be.
The book is useful, and not just to technical writers. Often programmers should be involved in some writing of that help text. Or even if they aren't, then they have to aid a writer in composing it. In either case, an appreciation of what makes good online help may lead to better information being conveyed.
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