Getting Started with Google Wave Review

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Getting Started with Google Wave ReviewI'm a huge fan of O'Reilly's publications. They've gotten me through more "you need to know about this stuff yesterday" situations than I can count. And I'm curious about Google Wave, a technology everyone is interested in, but nobody quite seems to know what to do with. So I was happy to see _Getting Started with Google Wave_ from O'Reilly's innovative Ebook series. Unfortunately, for me, this is a book that doesn't seem to have a clear idea of who its audience is and what they need to know. It's a little bit this and a little bit that.
The first chapter starts off with a very high level market-y re-hash of the Google announcement and initial reviews. Not much useful information there that isn't available tons of other places. Then in this high-level chapter, it procedes to define Google Wave using definitions that are so closely "based" on the Google API documents, that it is really at most half a step away from raw cutting and pasting. From a 10,000 foot view to a ten-foot view with nothing in-between. There isn't much in the way of contextualizing and the vocabulary is likely to be confusing to some parts of their (not very well-defined) audience.
For example, the definition of "document" in the "Wave, Wavelets, and Blips, Oh My" section asserts that a "document is the content attached to a blip," ie, the tiny piece of text inside a single "entry". That makes precise sense in the context of an API (it's pretty much a straight cut and paste from the API docs), but not in the context of a book that is also supposed to help general users. Indeed elsewhere in the book, the same word is defined as meaning an entire wave. A section in the second chapter is called "Hey, We're Creating a Document". So the same word means the snippet inside an entry *and* the whole thing. Because the audience hasn't been clearly defined, information that makes sense for developers and information that makes sense for end-users has been smushed together in a way that could easily be confusing for both. And this uneasy mixture of marketing, some stuff from various sources, and technically intriguing but developer-level detail is repeated throughout.
When book finally gets around to describing what most readers are probably looking for, how to use the client, it falls back on the "describe the elements of the GUI" (The Conversation Pane, The Navigation Pane, etc.) model. There's not much integrating that approach into descriptions of how users can actually accomplish tasks, which for most people is a much more helpful way to organize things. See, for example, Gina Trapani and Adam Pash's _The Complete Guide to Google Wave_ for a substantially more successful attempt to organize information needed by end-users.
Finally the book is in need of at least a cursory copy-edit. I know these little books are supposed to be done quickly, but someone somewhere should have caught things like "teenie bopper" or "but it's[sic] threaded and messaging functionality".
Summary: there's a fair amount of information in here, but it feels unfocussed and thrown together. Particularly if you are interested in Wave from an end-user's perspective, you're probably better off with the Trapani book.Getting Started with Google Wave Overview
Get in front of Google Wave, the exciting new real-time communication and collaboration technology that unifies email, instant messaging (IM), wiki, and social networking functions on one integrated platform. Getting Started with Google Wave gives you a good look at this game-changing technology while it's still in the development stage. In the first two chapters, you'll quickly learn about the Google Wave structure and how it works. The second two chapters help you work with the Google Wave Client, a web app that allows end users to participate and collaborate.



Become familiar with Google Wave's key concepts and terminology
Learn about the threaded conversation model incorporated into conversations, or waves
Get use cases that show how the platform offers consumers a distinct advantage over current communication and collaboration technologies
Learn about extensions such as wavelets, blips, gadgets, and robots

More than a million users have downloaded Google Wave since it became available in public preview. Don't wait. Catch the wave with this book.


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