It’s been 4 solid weeks of writing text and running tests. Always a scramble at the end, and there’s always more that you can think of writing.
Category: Documentation
New book underway – MQ V8
This week a group of us got together in Hursley and started on the next IBM Redbook for MQ. This time it’s about the newly announced MQ V8.
Read more about the new book
MQ V7.1 and V7.5 Redbook now fully available
The MQ V7.1 and V7.5 book from which the new Primer was extracted has now completed its journey through graphics design and editing and is available here in pdf, epub and (in a few days) hardcopy. Thanks to those people who provided comments on the draft.
A couple of the other authors wrote about their experiences in this blog post.
I’m not really that colour
I didn’t know this video had gone live, and found it by chance while looking for something else.
I think it was the first time I’d done anything long direct to camera, and that shows. And I’m not really that John Boehner/Dale Winton (trying to cover different country reference points) colour. But it was a fun thing to do one afternoon while we were writing the book last year. Hopefully the video release means that the final edited version of the redbook is closer too.
MQ Primer now finalised
The MQ Primer discussed here and here has completed its journey through the editing and production process, and is now available at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/redp0021.html
Downloads are available in both PDF and EPUB format. You can also use calibre to convert to mobi format for Kindles.
Show, don’t tell. MS0P education on youtube.
I’ve just released a new version of SupportPac MS0P V7.1.0.2 containing a couple of new features. This package started out as my attempt to learn Java programming and it did one thing only, formatting MQ event messages into readable text from within the MQ Explorer.
Over the years it has grown into a collection of utilities, still mostly for the Explorer, but all aimed at making it easier to use MQ. Although the package contains documentation, we all know how much people read the books (at least it’s not an InfoCentre format). And so I decided to produce video demonstrations as an alternative.
Continue reading “Show, don’t tell. MS0P education on youtube.”
This post was last updated on November 18th, 2019 at 08:56 pm
Bigger Brother draft redbook also now available
The first public draft of the full V7.1 and V7.5 redbook is now available. The (very) big brother of the new MQ primer has about 450 pages of information and scenarios. As a draft, again, it’s subject to change before final publication.
This book is completely new. It covers a mix of features on both distributed and z/OS platforms.
Updating a classic
When someone is new to MQ, the document they are often told to read is the MQSeries Primer. This is a very short publication from the IBM Redbooks team (the ITSO) that covers the basics of MQ. But it was written in 1999 and has not been updated to take account of new features (or even the new product name).
A few months ago, we got approval to write a new book covering features of the recent MQ 7.1 and 7.5 releases. I’m not going to talk much more about that book in this post, and I’ll let some others from the team comment on it if they wish. The book is still being written, and I expect to see a draft in about a month’s time.
But I decided my participation was also an opportunity to refresh the Primer. We should be able to reuse material: have an introduction to MQ in the full book, but also have it as a standalone Redpiece still referenced from the same URL as the original primer.
I read the 1999 material quickly and thought it would be reasonably simple to modify aspects like the product name or lists of features, and remove obsolete comments such as the one about Y2K compliance. But nothing is ever that simple.
First problem was that the ITSO couldn’t find the source to the document. But at least we could get the text extracted from the PDF and Marcela did a superb job re-tagging the paragraphs so it looked sensible in the authoring environment.
Then I started on the rewrite.
The ITSO has style guidelines for its books, to ensure consistency and clarity. The Primer met very few of those guidelines.
I felt it was not structured in the sequence I would do it. So I’ve been moving and rearranging content.
It had too many specific comments about features that might have been exciting or new in the V5.x releases – those either had to be removed or rewritten to show them as standard features.
And so on …
Right now I’m about half-way through the rewrite, before the editors get their hands on it to “correct” my English spelling into American (another style point that seems more of a rule than a guideline).
I suspect that almost none of the original text will survive this exercise. But I’m not going to denigrate the book – it still has most of the right subjects at the right kind of level. What I originally wanted to do was cosmetic surgery, but we’ve ended up with a brain/body transplant instead. Even so, I hope my rewrite will preserve and respect the intention of what Dieter wrote in 1999. And that we can continue to have a basic introduction to MQ that people find valuable.
This post was last updated on November 27th, 2021 at 03:01 pm