<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: good introduction to wiki concepts but assumes perl
Review: A "Wiki" is a web site, where every page is editable, by anybody with a browser. It may seem wierd, but it's a very powerful, and successful, idea. The most well-known Wiki has been running since 1994 with thousands of users. This book covers how and why Wiki works, case studies of use, and installing, configuring, and customizing an open-source Wiki supplied on CD. If you know a little about Wiki, and want more, this is a great book. It's sprinkled with practical advice and gives real code examples for enhancements. It can also be inspirational and has got me buzzing with ideas. It has a fine index and all the "tips" are listed for easy reference. Wiki's obscurity is its greatest weakness, though. If you have never heard the term "Wiki", you would never think to pick up this book. I also found that the assumption of Perl in the example software sections clashed with the language independent nature of the theory and case-study sections. And beware that the book ignores or glosses over a few things which require more effort than in other systems. If you find it clumsy or slow to get things on a web site, if you are looking for an easy way to let people collaborate, or if you just want to make sense of all your scattered notes, read this book.
Rating:
Summary: good introduction to wiki concepts but assumes perl
Review: A "Wiki" is a web site, where every page is editable, by anybody with a browser. It may seem wierd, but it's a very powerful, and successful, idea. The most well-known Wiki has been running since 1994 with thousands of users. This book covers how and why Wiki works, case studies of use, and installing, configuring, and customizing an open-source Wiki supplied on CD. If you know a little about Wiki, and want more, this is a great book. It's sprinkled with practical advice and gives real code examples for enhancements. It can also be inspirational and has got me buzzing with ideas. It has a fine index and all the "tips" are listed for easy reference. Wiki's obscurity is its greatest weakness, though. If you have never heard the term "Wiki", you would never think to pick up this book. I also found that the assumption of Perl in the example software sections clashed with the language independent nature of the theory and case-study sections. And beware that the book ignores or glosses over a few things which require more effort than in other systems. If you find it clumsy or slow to get things on a web site, if you are looking for an easy way to let people collaborate, or if you just want to make sense of all your scattered notes, read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Practical and Enlightening
Review: An excellent book about Wiki technology, providing both a hands-on discussion on running and using Wikis and well founded discussions of the philosophical underpinnings of Wiki design (how much formatting to allow, and how much security to provide). I particularly appreciated the comparisions between the various Wiki servers, and would have liked to see even more of that. On the other hand, I thought that the discussion of how to tinker with the bundled QuikiWiki server was somewhat excessive.
Rating: 
Summary: The bible for the wiki community
Review: This book describes the technology and culture of the wiki open web authoring system. The CD-ROM contains all the necessary software to install a wiki and one third of the book explains how the software does it's magic and how it might be expanded to do even more. The first part contains a step-by-step introduction to the wiki ideas and culture and the last part tells about the wiki experiences in the corporate world and at universities. The book is written extremely well and easy to follow, sometimes even entertaining. It touches all important aspects of installing and maintaining a wiki server and of running a wiki community. During the last 8 months I did many of the things described based on my own explorations and using a different software. This books would have saved me many weeks of labour. I may lack objectivity, but this book is bound to become the bible for the wiki world. What's to criticize? First: there is almost no hype in this book, too little for the lots of enthusiastic users out there. Second: the book offers a baseline system, some clones and lots of optional extensions and invites to experiment. I think that most readers would prefer a full-featured proven standard system out of the box. Third: it's conservative approach about some features - like edit conflict resolution or page deletion - shows how quickly things are moving. Is this criticism correct? I don't know, you decide. To me, it's an excellent book. It's the important, long awaited reference. It's the landmark showing that the wiki is about to change from an insider tip to an established technology. It clearly deserves 5 (*****) stars. If you are interested in wiki, online communities or knowledge management at all, you must know this book.
Rating:
Summary: What creates the sense of community?
Review: What creates the sense of community that you feel in certain newsgroups, mailing lists, or IRC's? What drives people to gather there? If you find this question interesting, then look at Wiki: it is an example of a strong community on the web. Wiki (the collaboration tool) can be thought of as a lightweight WebDAV (web Distributed Authoring and Versioning)
without n levels of standards committees. In a Wiki site, every page can be edited by anybody, and new page links 'spring into existence' automatically just by RunningCapitalizedWordsTogether. This simple concept, created by Ward Cunningham, is surprisingly powerful. The technology behind it is also simple, and the wiki code that makes this work is written in perl, so if you want to add a feature or tweak it, then you can 'hack it'. A visit to the original Wiki web site can be very rewarding, at [1]. At this site, the community includes many experts in Design Patterns and Extreme Programming (XP). You will find literate discussions on software and life in general. Laird Cameron describes Wiki well in his Open Sources column [2]. This book is an overview of Wiki, and a detailed how-to look at the code. The book is casual and informal, well suited to the wiki culture. It explains the thought processes which went into the design of wiki planning, deployment, and basic administration. The book contains case studies from academia and the corporate world. The accompanying CD will get you going quickly. You will want to read this book, if:
- In the corporate world, you want your group to pull together and create a knowledge base.
- For the design of your software product, you want to understand group dynamics.
- In the academic world, you want an online meeting place for course work or peer review.
- You are studying the design and implementation of collaborative tools.
- For your personal use, you need a notebook that goes with you wherever there is a web browser. Wiki's perl source can be hard to read,
and you will be wanting to change it.
Maybe Wiki is an entertainment for your spare time,
and then you can just play around with it.
However, you probably need this book if you are
deploying a wiki at work. This book presents a relaxed, 'democratic' approach to Information Architecture. It encourages you to provide minimal structure: the inclusion of a search function, a recent changes page, users' mini-bios, and links to return to the top. The wiki users are encouraged to structure the content, and this book suggests how they might be encouraged to do so. For counterpoint see Rosenfeld [3] who describes how to structure a conventional web site: organize information, help navigation, label the content, configure the search system, and manage the process. I was interested by the discussion of the many Wiki clones, in Perl, SmallTalk, Java, and others. Everyone has different preferences for UI features and implementation. Also interesting was part 3, which discusses the Wiki culture.
Wiki has fostered strong community spirit among those who have
contributed to its design and implementation.
People express diverse opinions yet work together well.
Compare this 'atmosphere' with that of of some news groups where
flames are common. When you set up a Wiki for use by your colleagues or students, you need to understand the group dynamics of a successful collaboration site, and this part of the book will help you to encourage people to take roles and get involved, thereby extending the community. I have a few quibbles about the book and CD.
- Readers will want to visit the book's errata page [4] before using the CD.
- There is a 64 page subsection, with one contents entry, which is hard to navigate other than to read it sequentially (it spans pages 143 to 207).
- The source code examples in the book have an indentation width of one space (though the source on CD is formatted correctly).
- The book and CD are intended for users of MS Windows, which is unusual when discussing open source. This quibble is very minor, as the book and CD are platform neutral in most ways. The book gets five stars at Amazon and a good review at Fatbrain. Recommended! At your bookstore, look for the cover drawing by M.C. Escher of two drawing hands, with nifty reflection effects. By the way, you will have already heard of the untimely demise of Douglas Adams. His Guide to the Galaxy, similar to a Wiki, lives on at www.h2g2.com. [1] www.c2.com/cgi/wiki [2] Server/Workstation Expert Magazine, March 2001:
swexpert.com/CC/SE.C12.MAR.01.pdf [3] Rosenfeld and Morville _Information Architecture_, O'Reilly [4] the errata page: wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WikiWayErrata
Rating:
Summary: What creates the sense of community?
Review: What creates the sense of community that you feel in certain newsgroups, mailing lists, or IRC's? What drives people to gather there? If you find this question interesting, then look at Wiki: it is an example of a strong community on the web. Wiki (the collaboration tool) can be thought of as a lightweight WebDAV (web Distributed Authoring and Versioning)
without n levels of standards committees. In a Wiki site, every page can be edited by anybody, and new page links 'spring into existence' automatically just by RunningCapitalizedWordsTogether. This simple concept, created by Ward Cunningham, is surprisingly powerful. The technology behind it is also simple, and the wiki code that makes this work is written in perl, so if you want to add a feature or tweak it, then you can 'hack it'. A visit to the original Wiki web site can be very rewarding, at [1]. At this site, the community includes many experts in Design Patterns and Extreme Programming (XP). You will find literate discussions on software and life in general. Laird Cameron describes Wiki well in his Open Sources column [2]. This book is an overview of Wiki, and a detailed how-to look at the code. The book is casual and informal, well suited to the wiki culture. It explains the thought processes which went into the design of wiki planning, deployment, and basic administration. The book contains case studies from academia and the corporate world. The accompanying CD will get you going quickly. You will want to read this book, if:
- In the corporate world, you want your group to pull together and create a knowledge base.
- For the design of your software product, you want to understand group dynamics.
- In the academic world, you want an online meeting place for course work or peer review.
- You are studying the design and implementation of collaborative tools.
- For your personal use, you need a notebook that goes with you wherever there is a web browser. Wiki's perl source can be hard to read,
and you will be wanting to change it.
Maybe Wiki is an entertainment for your spare time,
and then you can just play around with it.
However, you probably need this book if you are
deploying a wiki at work. This book presents a relaxed, 'democratic' approach to Information Architecture. It encourages you to provide minimal structure: the inclusion of a search function, a recent changes page, users' mini-bios, and links to return to the top. The wiki users are encouraged to structure the content, and this book suggests how they might be encouraged to do so. For counterpoint see Rosenfeld [3] who describes how to structure a conventional web site: organize information, help navigation, label the content, configure the search system, and manage the process. I was interested by the discussion of the many Wiki clones, in Perl, SmallTalk, Java, and others. Everyone has different preferences for UI features and implementation. Also interesting was part 3, which discusses the Wiki culture.
Wiki has fostered strong community spirit among those who have
contributed to its design and implementation.
People express diverse opinions yet work together well.
Compare this 'atmosphere' with that of of some news groups where
flames are common. When you set up a Wiki for use by your colleagues or students, you need to understand the group dynamics of a successful collaboration site, and this part of the book will help you to encourage people to take roles and get involved, thereby extending the community. I have a few quibbles about the book and CD.
- Readers will want to visit the book's errata page [4] before using the CD.
- There is a 64 page subsection, with one contents entry, which is hard to navigate other than to read it sequentially (it spans pages 143 to 207).
- The source code examples in the book have an indentation width of one space (though the source on CD is formatted correctly).
- The book and CD are intended for users of MS Windows, which is unusual when discussing open source. This quibble is very minor, as the book and CD are platform neutral in most ways. The book gets five stars at Amazon and a good review at Fatbrain. Recommended! At your bookstore, look for the cover drawing by M.C. Escher of two drawing hands, with nifty reflection effects. By the way, you will have already heard of the untimely demise of Douglas Adams. His Guide to the Galaxy, similar to a Wiki, lives on at www.h2g2.com. [1] www.c2.com/cgi/wiki [2] Server/Workstation Expert Magazine, March 2001:
swexpert.com/CC/SE.C12.MAR.01.pdf [3] Rosenfeld and Morville _Information Architecture_, O'Reilly [4] the errata page: wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WikiWayErrata
Rating:
Summary: How to do things wiki-way
Review: WikiWiki has changed my life. It's not only the first-hand influence that I can organize my ideas more efficiently and effectively, but it also has changed the way I look at technology, society, and human collaboration as a whole. Though this book is specifically designed to give a good explanation of Wiki, seen generally, it's much more than that: it is about knowledge management. You'll benefit enormously from this book if you are anyhow involved in Knowledge Management, even if you are not going to use Wiki in your setting. The virtue of this book is that it's in DocumentMode so that the reader can grab the essence of the essences of a few millions of man-hour experiences in a few ticks of the clock; I even feel jealous of the readers who'll read this book as their starting point -- I had to experiment and trial-and-error for several months to get the real meaning of it and WikiMaster Mind. Thank you, Ward Cunningham for writing this wonderful book, and creating wonderful Wiki-Way.
<< 1 >>
| 
