Название: Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing
Автор: Jared Bhatti, Zachary Sarah Corleissen, Jen Lambourne
Издательство: Apress
Год: 2021
Страниц: 241
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub
Размер: 10.17 MB

Learn to integrate programming with good documentation. This book teaches you the craft of documentation for each step in the software development lifecycle, from understanding your users’ needs to publishing, measuring, and maintaining useful developer documentation. Well-documented projects save time for both developers on the project and users of the software. Projects without adequate documentation suffer from poor developer productivity, project scalability, user adoption, and accessibility. In short: bad documentation kills projects.

Docs for Developers demystifies the process of creating great developer documentation, following a team of software developers as they work to launch a new product. At each step along the way, you learn through examples, templates, and principles how to create, measure, and maintain documentation—tools you can adapt to the needs of your own organization.

Code samples are a critical part of effective developer documentation. Text and code are different languages, and it is code that your reader ultimately cares about.2 No matter how clear or beautifully articulated your words, nothing beats a well-crafted code sample to help your readers get started or to demonstrate how to use a particular feature. A good sample can say more than the prose that describes it while providing a useful frame of reference for your readers to build upon.

If code samples are the gold your readers are hunting for, then samples need to be specific, useful, and maintainable. The Chapter 5 covers:

• Types of code samples
• Principles of good samples
• Designing useful code samples
• Generating samples from the source code

What You'll Learn:

Create friction logs and perform user research to understand your users’ frustrations
Research, draft, and write different kinds of documentation, including READMEs, API documentation, tutorials, conceptual content, and release notes
Publish and maintain documentation alongside regular code releases
Measure the success of the content you create through analytics and user feedback
Organize larger sets of documentation to help users find the right information at the right time

Who This Book Is For:
Ideal for software developers who need to create documentation alongside code, or for technical writers, developer advocates, product managers, and other technical roles that create and contribute to documentation for their products and services.