The movies came first and the books are spin offs. Lucas planned nine moves and started making the middle three first.
Well that's the strange thing about Star Wars, there are only four movies so far and no tv series. In Star Trek, the only canon sources are the the 4 TV series and 9 movies. There are maybe two hundreds novels but these are not halal (maybe I should use kosher). I personally have read about a hundred of these. In Star Wars, 4 movies just don't have that much meat and everything is kosher - computer games, and novels (presumably there are at least 100 of these). Then there are fanatics which comb through everything and compile the information on different websites according to categories - ships, races, planets, equipment etc.
[This message has been edited by kobayashi (edited June 30, 2001).]