Boost Your Productivity with IT Subject Areas

We have expanded the functionality of our IT Handbook by introducing IT Subject Areas, which group related topics into “topic families.” Every topic posted is assigned one or more tags that link to a corresponding Subject Area page. We also provide an index that lists all Subject Areas on a single page.

This Subject Area functionality can boost your productivity, as it allows you to browse multiple related items quickly. Our Subject Area pages also provide Members with precise filtering features, allowing you to easily focus 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 Subject Areas page
• Enter “front” in the Search field above the list of Subject Areas
• Hit enter
• Click on the Front End Technologies panel
  • Note how our Search function works instantly to show matching items
• Browse the Front End Technologies page with all related topics
• Members can then use Advanced Filters to narrow down the selection by Topic Type, Topic Level, and Video Clip availability
  • This is a Premium Feature and a valuable Membership benefit

There, presto!

A Great Way to Learn About IT

We believe that Subject Areas 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 Subject Area 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 feature an embedded YouTube video to illustrate the subject 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 see the highlights, you can read the topic definitions and navigate back and forth across a family of related topics. In under 10 minutes, you can cover many associated items and gain a solid understanding of that specific IT Subject Area.

Lots of Subject Areas

We use more than 200 Subject Areas 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 encompass more topics, thereby enabling more effective 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 type of Subject Area you want to focus on when 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.