Do People Really Read the J2EE Tutorial?
I've been wondering a lot lately about what types of docs are the most helpful and what people really want to see. Case in point:
The J2EE 1.4 Tutorial in NetBeans IDE
This doc is full of great information if you're trying to learn J2EE. It's got lots of completed examples and steps to reproduce from scratch, configure, package, and deploy.
But do people really read it? That's the question.
Some of the engineers here would just shake their heads and laugh when they saw me laboring away at this 330 page behemoth. "John! No one's going to read that! It's too long! No one has time to read a 300 page tutorial!"
To some extent, the stats seem to back them up. BTW - if you're interested in which netbeans.org pages get the most traffic, check this out:
http://www.netbeans.org/download/webstats/www/
So it looks like in May, a whopping 16,377 users went to the main intro page of the tutorial. Wow! That's great, right? Well... About half of them made it to the intro page (8483), at which point a whole lot of them were scared off by the huge size of the TOC. Only 2505 actually started reading it.
The thing is, the tutorial is really not meant to be read front-to-back. You're supposed to hop around. So it seems like having that huge Overview section right up at the front may be a bit of a mistake. Some people did hop around. 986 went straight to the Web Services section, and looks like about 750 made it to the EJB section.
And then there's the wild card: 6068 downloaded the entire thing. So that's heartening 
OK, enough stats. What this boils down to is finding that balance between clean and quick guides and something that is going to be more substantial than a quick start guide. Any help from our users is greatly appreciated.
