« CEILING() :: MySQL Function of the Day | Main | BENCHMARK() :: MySQL Function of the Day »
How to Kill Your Book Sales
By Carsten | April 16, 2008
This morning, as I was looking for some introductory material on a programming language, I came across a document which would probably have done the job just right. It’s just that this particular document, despite its excellent technical points and clear explanation, will end up turning away a lot of its potential readers.
It’s written in English, which means that it is accessible to a very large part of the world’s population. Even where English as a second language is not that wide-spread, I think it’s fair to say that anyone interested in programming a computer is forced into learning at least basic English. People in India (pop. 1.1 billion) certainly read English, and I’ve met many Chinese (pop. 1.3 billion) with excellent English skills.
In other words, if you’re writing programming books in English, your potential readership is quite a bit larger than you might have originally thought. And yet, this document, like so many others, does all it can to kill off 90% of the potential readership right from the start.
If you want to follow their lead, then I have a very simple method for you to do so:
The answer: Write about baseball.
The document in question continues a worrying trend of many documentation writers of utilizing baseball statistics to show off how easy it is, with this particular framework, to lay out the data and provide all kinds of statistics and cross-references.
Baseball is really great that way. There’s hardly a game in the world that contains so many numbers, over such a long period of time. All kinds of numbers can be compared game-by-game, team-by-team, season-by-season, throughout the lifetime of a player, you name it. They can be summed up, averaged, median-ized, and computed to the 33rd dimension.
In short, there is hardly a better place to go for numbers, when you want to show off your programming language, your spreadsheet application, your database. And since it’s America’s National pastime, everyone is bound to understand at least the basics of the game, right?
No.
Baseball is said to be USA’s 2nd most popular sport. So it might come as a surprise to you that the rest of the world doesn’t really know about the game. Really. We might have seen some American movies that give us a hint of what a Home Run entails. “Strike” — no idea. “Top of the inning” — huh?
Great Britain and India are two obvious places to go sell your shiny new textbooks. And while a good part of the people in these countries do play games involving hitting round white things with bats, the game they play is cricket, not baseball. And while those two games might share some vocabulary, none of the concepts will translate from one to the other.
But I’ve seen on TV that Baseball is really big in Japan! I hear you say. Quite true. Unfortunately, Japan is the only sizable country (in terms of population) outside North America where baseball is relatively popular. On top of that, Japan is also one of the few countries where readers actually do expect a textbook to be translated into their local language and will not be satisfied with an English version.
As for the rest of the world, we don’t know and we don’t care.
If you’re about to embark on writing technical articles, software manuals, instruction books or anything of that nature and want to kill off 90% of the potential readership, baseball stats are the way to go. To really top it off, don’t forget to include some “classic” baseball quotes and anecdotes. And remember to add in the story about how you almost got to meet Babe Ruth (who’s he?) when you were 3 years old and your dad almost took you to the [insert name of some big game that means nothing to the reader], except that he didn’t, and in any case you wouldn’t have remembered. But it all helps filling out the pages on which you’d otherwise have to put things of relevance to the reader.
Oh, and don’t forget to show off a transformation where you change “William” into “Bill”. It might make sense to you, but the rest of the world is still scratching its head at that one…
oooOOOooo
Be very careful when picking your data set for demonstration. Not everyone shares your passion, and, if they live in another country, they very likely don’t have the slightest clue about the subject on which you are so enthusiastic.
Pick a data set which (a) everyone in your target group can relate to, no matter where they live, and (b) is simple enough that people can grasp it in a few seconds. If the barrier to understanding your basic data set is too high, you’ve lost people before they’ve even reached the part you really want to show them.*
Below are three good examples, which have been used over the years. They are not MySQL-specific in any way, so can be used for writing about any database system or programming language.
The World Database available at dev.mysql.com. A small database containing somewhat dated information on countries, cities, regions, populations and other demographic data for a good part of the world. Good for showing relationships, table structures and so forth. Too small for demonstrating benchmarking and optimizations. The World database has been used for several years by MySQL in documentation and training alike.
The Sakila database, created by Mike Hillyer back when he was a member of the MySQL documentation team. it’s somewhat larger than the World database, and includes a number of additional features to show off the then-new features of MySQL 5.0
I believe the first time I heard about using publically-available Flightstats database for teaching databases was when Jeremy Cole suggested using it in the MySQL training program to demonstrate working with large data sets. I’m not sure it ever got used for that purpose, but others have followed up on the same idea in other contexts. The Flightstats database contains 10 +years of US airline flight information, consisting of several Gigabytes of data in a fairly wide table, and so is excellent for talking about optimizations and search strategies.
* But please, please don’t make it “products” and “parts”. Anyone who’s been reading Date at university has had quite enough of that to last us for a lifetime…
Topics: MySQL |
April 16th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Carsten, good article. I’m doing tennis, not baseball. Still plenty of data - player data, tournament data, results data… - and the governing bodies have done a good job of collecting it and making it available on the internet.
I’d also recommend anyone looking for a data idea for use in a textbook on MySQL might think about movies - specifically DVDs. Think about a company (seven letters, first one is an ‘N’ and the last is an ‘x’) that delivers DVDs straight to our homes for our viewing pleasure - and all the data they have.