Crackers or nuts?

I've discovered a great blog by Jeff Atwood called Coding Horror. He has some great posts about putting human factors into software programming. His latest post entitled How Not To Write a Technical Book is very interesting.

He shows two different technical books, one that uses colour and has less writing and one that does that opposite. Which one is better?

Jeff posits that the book with the code in colour (rather than just Courier type) is better, but really, both presentations are flawed. Technical books are inherently hard to read. I spend a lot of time reading while I commute and I'd love to be able to really grok a good technical concept, but it's more difficult when you are away from the keyboard. Unfortunately, e-books aren't much better. They improve the ability to learn programming (cut and paste usually), but then it's difficult to read the text off of the screen.

I agree with Jeff that out of the two examples, Adam Nathan's WPF Book is easier on the eyes, but it doesn't overcome the bigger issue of a paper manual for a technical problem.

I'll find out soon enough as I've just ordered Adam Nathan's WPF Book and I'm eager to see the differences in real life.