Focus on decisions, not tasks

They say you should not judge a book by its cover, but I found it very hard not to [1]. After I found out the book was from 2013 I felt a slight sense of relief.

[1] https://xmlpress.net/publications/eppo/

What's even more ironic is that it's the most profound book about technical writing that I have yet found in my 12-year career.

It also inspired me to deep-dive into how the pages of my docs site relate to each other, which yielded some useful insights: https://technicalwriting.dev/data/intertwingularity.html

(Baker's book led me to Too Big To Know, which in turn led me to the concept of intertwingularity)

I'm afraid I don't follow: what's unusual about the printed cover of the book, and why is the date of publication relevant to your assessment?

The damaged, scribbled collage of papers that forms the background image of the cover was a pretty odd design choice IMO: https://xmlpress.net/wp-content/uploads/covers/EPPO-Cover-Fr...

It's surely related to the central thesis of the book (quoted below) but I think there could have been a more appealing way to get that idea across

> What is needed today is the same rigor and discipline professional writers have long brought to making books, but not the same methodology. The book model does not work for the Web or for content consumed in the context of the Web.

It’s ugly, but ugly in a way that was more common 11 years ago.

Hi. I wrote Too Big to Know, and your post intertwingled me with this thread, these books, and you.

(Note: I'm taking Google Alerts & Ego Salve as an ironic agent of Ted Nelson's concept of intertwingularity.)