Creating Effective JavaHelp

Acknowledgments

One of the most important chapters in this book, Chapter 7, would not have been possible without Marc Loy. The chapter is technical and required the touch of a talented Java developer. Marc wrote most of the first draft for me to make sure the chapter included the appropriate level of information for Java developers. As part of his work on the chapter, Marc also developed the small sample application that demonstrates the Java code for implementing JavaHelp. Finally, Marc also put together Appendix C. Thank you, Marc, for being so generous with your time and Java programming talents. This book would not be complete if it weren’t for your help.

I am also indebted to Alicia Norton, a colleague and extremely talented technical writer, for reviewing, editing, and testing every chapter of this book while I was writing it. Her efforts helped me turn in cleaner chapters during the writing process. Thank you, Alicia, for your feedback. And thank you for your encouragement throughout the entire book-writing process.

Thanks to O’Reilly—especially Mike Loukides—for your help and for the opportunity to write this book. Thanks to John Posner for all of your editing efforts when I finished the book. Also, thanks to Robert Romano for your help with the illustrations.

Sun Microsystems should be proud of their JavaHelp development team—particularly Larry Hoffman and Roger Brinkley—who answered my many, many emails, often within hours (and sometimes within minutes).

I must express gratitude to Dr. Kristin Woolever, my first technical writing teacher and mentor, for teaching me most of what I know about technical writing. Without you as a role model, Kristin, I would never have learned about computer writing and could never have written this book.

Finally, for all of my friends who had no idea what I’ve been writing about: read this book, and you’ll finally understand what JavaHelp is.