Multimedia publishing tools for software engineering

The authors describe their efforts in converting existing programming and software engineering textbooks into interactive multimedia products for distribution on CD-ROMs. While they are concentrating on titles for teaching computer science at an undergraduate level, the tools and techniques they use have wider application. The paper describes some of the techniques they have used to convey information in a way that is impossible to do in paper-based books and provide hints at how these are specified. In particular they describe how animations of program execution can be statically or dynamically specified and presented, and how information that is inherently hierarchical can be navigated. Also of interest is their way of providing additional information at the 'gateway' to a link that takes the user to a destination node; this enables the user to "make an informed decision before pursuing the link to the destination". Furthermore they offer an indication of how large a section is before the user has traversed the link to the start of that section.