I noticed the other day that O'Reilly has a new book format for prerelease software that relies on planning for and making incremental updates as the software is developed. After the software is released, the prerelease book and all of its updates are cleaned up and turned back into a book with standard formatting. It looks like a Silverlight 2 book is being used as the test subject. I think this approach is interesting as a response to how quickly software is developed and then obsoleted these days. Additionally, software is being developed with increasing amounts of transparency. Customers get early builds and trickles of information long before the official release date, and often while the software is still very malleable. By the time software is stable enough to write a real book about it, you've already missed the best window for publication for that release. Read More...