Boost Your Productivity with Core IT Concepts

We have expanded the functionality of our IT Handbook with Core IT Concepts to group related topics into “topic families”. Every topic posted is assigned one or more tags that link to a Core Concept page, and we provide an index that lists all Core Concepts on one page.

This Core Concept functionality can boost your productivity, as it is very easy to quickly browse multiple related items. Our Core Concept pages also provide Members with precise filtering features, so you can easily zoom in on the type or level of IT topic you are interested in at that time.

Powerful Browsing

For example, if you want to see all the Standard Level IT Tools for Front-end Technologies, you can do so in just a few clicks.

• First, navigate to the Core Concepts page
• Enter “front” in the Search field above the list of Core Concepts
• Hit enter
• Click on the Front End Technologies panel, which should now be the only panel you see
  • Note how our Search function works instantly to show matching items
• Browse the Front End Technologies page with all related topics
• Use any Advanced Filter to narrow down your selection
  • This is a Premium Feature and a valuable Membership benefit

There, presto!

A Great Way to Learn About IT

We believe that Core Concepts provide a terrific approach to learn about IT. You can easily select a theme of interest and quickly browse the topics you want to read more about.

This may sound very basic, but you need to see this in the context of our “time-based” approach to content. Every topic you navigate to from a Core Concept page has a clear and short definition, followed by a few sections describing the most important things to know about that topic. Many topics also have an embedded YouTube video to cover the topic visually. The reading time of the text is just a few minutes, while our video clips tend to be in the 5-10 minute range.

So, if you want to just see the highlights, you can just read the topic definitions and go back and forth across a family of related topics. In less than 10 minutes, you can cover many related items and get a solid understanding of that specific Core IT Concept.

Lots of Core Concepts

We use more than 200 Core Concepts to organize the IT topics in this IT Handbook, ranging from narrowly focused to “wide angle” in nature. This is helpful because the wide-angle concepts will naturally include more topics and thus enable more filtering.

For example, the Activity Diagram topic is connected with:

• Requirements Management, because it is used to diagram processes for this documentation
• Business Process Modeling, because it is a modeling tool in the larger context of BPM
• Business Analysis, because Business Analysts use these diagrams in their work

This multi-level approach enables you to select the kind of Core IT Concept that you are interested in when you are using this IT Handbook.

We specifically decided to build our “IT Handbook” as a website, rather than publishing this content as a book, because only a website enables this type of navigation, classification, and live filtering.