Jon Skeet (author of the truly excellent C# In Depth - I mean truly excellent, the best book I've read in the .NET sphere, bar none) blogged recently about the mess of version numbers in book titles about current versions of C# and .NET technology. He's right, Microsoft's fast-and-loose interpretation of the major/minor version number convention and its separation of language versioning from framework versioning has made a mess that's especially visible in the pages of Amazon's programming section. But I believe Jon's wrong to complain quite so much about the publishers who've elected to title books with the '2008' moniker; it may not be pedantically correct, but it's a darn sight better than most alternatives. The titling of these books is way more complicated than it looks; there are more subtle dynamics than mere precision at play here.
I've been here before, you see. Back in the days before it became a Wiley imprint, I was a kind of series-commissioning-technical-editor-cum-technical-reviewer-cum-author at Wrox Press, so I've got some experience of titling programming books in the face of pathological version numbering disasters. In particular, I cut my editorial teeth in Java books just as Sun, in their wisdom, decided to call the version of the Java platform that they shipped with version 1.2 of the SDK "Java 2". At that point, it wasn't too bad. We were able to bring out books with Java 2 in the title, and everybody could see that they were about a newer technology than those old books about Java 1.1. So far, so rosy.
Then Sun decided to release a new SDK version, 1.3. Suddenly, not so rosy. We needed to sell books that were:
- clearly about a newer technology than older books - the ones with Java 2 in the title - you want a punter in a bookshop with your new book, next to one of your competitor's older books, to pick your new one. "Hmm - Learn Java 2 in 123 microseconds, or Beginning JDK 1.3? I'll take the version 2 book, please!"
- clearly about version 1.3 of the SDK - you want punters who know they want a 1.3 book to find your book. It has to come up when they search for... whatever it is they're going to type when they search for it.
In the editorial team, we had to pick titles and convince the sales team that they could convince the book buyers in Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Borders that the title covered a new technology, would appeal to customers, and justified its place on the shelf instead of all those old books (Chainstore book buyers don't like clearing books that have a good sales history off their shelves, even if you tell them that the technology they cover is obsolete. They know that book sells; they don't trust this new book yet.)
The sales channel is a crucial part of the titling dynamic, because even more than the customer they buy based on title alone. And they shelve by title. A badly titled book will end up in the wrong bookcase entirely. A lot of early C# books wound up under 'C++', while general .NET titles ended up under 'networking' because bookstores didn't have a .NET category yet, and it looked like a networky word.
In the case of Java's 1.3 naming crisis, we tried to title books as new 'JDK 1.3 Editions' of existing Java 2 titles, which worked reasonably. The problem didn't get much better when Sun - in its wisdom - decided to title the next release 'Java 2 SDK 1.4'; My name (and part of my face) appears on a couple of differently-titled books that reflect the uncertainty that name switch caused:
Seriously. We called the technology an abbreviation of "Java Java Two Standard Edition One-Point-Four". And I stand by that - it was the right thing to do from a search optimisation and version clarity perspective, even though it was, pedantically, a mess. But it was Sun's mess. Sun's term - J2SDK 1.4 - was never going to fly in a book title for the sales channel. They knew J2SE (because J2EE titles had been such a success), they new Java, they wanted something bigger than 1.3.
Microsoft have put publishers in a similar position with .NET. In fact, they've put publishers in a worse position, by releasing .NET 3.0 with so few actual changes. Publishers updated general C# and VB.NET books to match the version number - and of course, nobody bought them. People bought WCF, WF and WPF books if they had an interest in those fields, I'm sure, but who would buy a .NET 3.0 update of a generic .NET book? Only newcomers picking up a first title, and only because the 3.0 book had obsoleted the old 2.0 one.
Then 3.5 comes along, and there are genuine changes, and for once people do want to buy books on C# and VB.NET again that cover all these new features, and... the book buyers say "A point release? You saw the sales figures for version 3.0, and that was a major update. The .NET book market is dead. You can't seriously expect us to buy new books for a point release."
Or worse, you come to them with a book claiming to be on C# 3. "Three-dot-oh is DEAD, I told you. What are you doing bringing us new books on last year's tech, when we couldn't even sell books on last year's tech last year? Come back when it's four-dot-oh and we'll talk."
Yeah, you try telling the sales guys it's C# 3 not .NET 3.0... see how well that meeting goes.
Bear in mind that these conversations with book buyers are all going on early in the pre-release cycle; books are announced and ordered six months ahead of release. And all the publishers are trying to pick the same naming convention as each other, because it's critical that if you're going to position your book as a competitor for one of the big players' books, you need to pick the same name for the technology. No book buyer will believe your Crazy C# 3 Tricks book competes with the market-leading Dull Business Applications with C# .NET 3.5 - the titles are totally different. And besides, C# 3 - that must be older than this competing .NET 3.5 book, right? Who cares if they got the title technically wrong, and you're right - what matters on the shelf - or in the search results - is that you're the same.
So what do sensible publishers do? They tie the new release books to the new Visual Studio version. Put 2008 on a book and it looks a lot sharper and more interesting to a book buyer than that tired old 2005 edition (albeit with the 'Covers .NET 3.0!' flash on the cover). You can make up for the version number chaos in the subtitle (because even though nobody reads it, it'll help with search results). So you wind up with Serious C# 2008 Edn: .NET 3.5 Development With C# 3.
Now, not all of the publishers have played this game all that well, I'll admit, and I'm far enough out of the publishing loop that I'm sure my intuitions about how the market influenced the book titles in this release cycle is a mile off the mark, but even if I'm wrong about how it works nowadays, I think it's particularly unfair to criticise them for not using C# 3 in the book titles. That was never going to fly after the .NET 3.0 release.
Still, I guess with the way computer book publishing's been going in the years since I left the industry (that's a correlation, not a causation), optimising book titles is probably a case of rearranging the deckchairs on the beachfront at Atlantis, but I just wanted to point out that in the list of people I considered when I was choosing book titles, version number pedants came pretty low down.
Probably just below the ill-informed marketing people who tried to persuade us that using non-trademarked names instead of the Official Name™ when referring to their product was somehow a trademark violation...