Books All Technical Writers Should Own

Books Taught in Courses

1	"Technical Communication by Rebecca E. Burnett"
2	"Human Factors for Technical Communicators"
3	"The Elements of Editing"

General Design Knowledge

Edward R. Tufte's books. I own the three I've listed below and they are incredible (and fun) to read. Tufte knows more about displaying information then anyone I've met in my life.

"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information"
"Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative"
"Envisioning Information" (if you are only going to get one, get this one first)

Tufte is a wonderful speaker and worth seeing. Here is his website:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/1576494545/tufte/

Fonts: A Guide for Designers and Editors

Big Book of 5000 Fonts

Indexing

1	"The Art of Indexing by Larry S. Bonura"
2	"Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice"

Making Money as a Consultant

1	"Arco Making Money in Technical Writing"

Project Management

1	Managing Your Documentation Projects
2	Writing Software Documentation: A Task-Oriented Approach

References

"TCP/IP Tutorial & Technical Overview"
Adolpho Rodriguez

The comprehensive, authoritative introduction to the protocols that drive the Internet Covers internetworking, routing, transport protocols, multicast, and much more. Includes detailed coverage of application protocols. This book is also available in html and .pdf formats (7.7mb) for free from http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/gg243376.html but 980 pages is a lot of downloading and it is nice to own the book. Definitely read this book if you want to get a job working in High Tech as a Technical Writer.

Newton's Telecom Dictionary: 17th Edition

Style Guides

1	I know I've said it before but the "The Chicago Manual of Style" is a "must own" book.
2	The "Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications"
3	The Elements of Style, Strunk and White (I'm not crazy about this book but I've included it because Writers swear by it)

Writing Clearly

1	Revising Business Prose
2	Bugs in Writing Revised: A Guide to Debugging Your Prose
3	Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing
4	Style : Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace

Writing for the Web

1	Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity (good examples)
2	GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers (5 minutes a day with this one)
3	Designing and Writing Online Documentation: Hypermedia for Self- Supporting Products, 2nd Edition

Writing vs. Technical Writing

1	The Levels of Edit (differences between writing and editing)
2	The User Manual Manual : How to Research, Write, Test, Edit & Produce a Software (software development methodology)

Specific Software

1	FrameMaker Books As far as I know, there are only two FrameMaker books worth owning. If anyone knows of others I should consider, please let me know: OtherFrameMakerBooks@altogether.com. I own an use both of the books below: "Adobe Framemaker 6.0 Classroom in a Book" (a great beginner's guide) "FrameMaker 6: Beyond the Basics" (tips and tricks I doubt I could have learned any other way)
2	WebWorks Books More WebWorks books should exist. If you want to make money, you might consider becoming a WebWorks expert and writing a WebWorks book. Here is the only book I know of but at least it is a really good one: "The WebWorks Publisher Cookbook : Transforming Your FrameMaker Files to HTML and Online Help" Meanwhile, you can also get a lot of great and very specific information from the Yahoo newsgroup: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wwp-users.
3	RoboHELP Books To be quite honest, I don't use RoboHELP so I don't know which of these books is best. I've included them because others in my office use it. Essentials of RoboHelp HTML 9 : Skills & Drills RoboHELP 2000 Bible (with CD-ROM) RoboHELP® 7 For Dummies®
4	Microsoft Word Books Mastering and Using Microsoft Word 2000 Advanced Course

Do you know of other great books I should consider reading?
Please drop me a line: OtherBooks@altogether.com.