Well, this is not directly programming related! But a friend of mine wants to write a book about programming. Now he asked me if I knew a good software for this, because Word crashes 10 times a day on his machine, and OpenOffice is just very chunky and slow. Also none of them seem to have any useful support for including Code Listings (examples) with useful syntax highlighting or at least some sort of support for inserting code (i.e. indicating line breaks with arrows that turn around, line numbers, etc). Latex is out of question since it's incredible hard to use and has no really useful feature for including tables. It's a mess.

Maybe some IT authors are here who can give some hints what tools they use. That would be great!