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Looking for a way to invigorate your technical writing team and grow that expertise to include developers, designers, and writers of all backgrounds? When you treat docs like code, you multiply everyone's efforts and streamline processes through collaboration, automation, and innovation. Second edition now available with updates and more information about version control for documents and continuous publishing.
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. 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.
This book provides a broad perspective about the essential aspects of creating technical documentation in today's product development world. It is a book of opinions and guidance, collected as short essays. You can read selectively about subjects that interest you, or you can read the entire collection in any order you like. Information development is a multidimensional discipline, and it is easy to theorize. We have written this book from our direct experience, using the concrete insights and practices we apply to our work every day. If you work as an information developer, a manager in a documentation team, or in another part of product development that collaborates with a doc team, there is information in this book for you. Perhaps you are a technical writer in a small, high-growth company that is figuring out its processes. Perhaps you are an information-development manager in a large enterprise company with an expanding product line and an ever more complex matrix of cross-functional dependencies. You might work at a medium-sized company where your management is asking you to do more with fewer people, and you want some additional perspective that will help you find a leaner and more effective way to deliver what your business demands. Or you might work outside the technical documentation world, in another part of product development, and are wondering how to collaborate most effectively with the documentation team. The purpose of The Product is Docs is to provoke discussion, shine light on some murky areas, and--we hope--inspire our colleagues to consider their processes and assumptions with new eyes. -- Amazon.
Maximize the impact and precision of your message! Now in its fourth edition, the Microsoft Manual of Style provides essential guidance to content creators, journalists, technical writers, editors, and everyone else who writes about computer technology. Direct from the Editorial Style Board at Microsoft—you get a comprehensive glossary of both general technology terms and those specific to Microsoft; clear, concise usage and style guidelines with helpful examples and alternatives; guidance on grammar, tone, and voice; and best practices for writing content for the web, optimizing for accessibility, and communicating to a worldwide audience. Fully updated and optimized for ease of use, the Microsoft Manual of Style is designed to help you communicate clearly, consistently, and accurately about technical topics—across a range of audiences and media.
The #1 guide to creating effective online documentation is now updated and expanded to reflect the latest technological advances, including multimedia. "...online documentation is a different medium, as different from books as television is from radio or movies from novels. This edition treats online documentation as the new electronic medium it is." -William Horton Written by an internationally renowned pioneer in the field of technical communication, this is an incomparable guide to the art and science of creating online documents and documentation systems. Rather than concentrating on any one particular program or operating system, William Horton cuts to the heart of effective human-computer interaction and extrapolates a set of universal principles that can be applied to any form of online documentation-from messages, menus, and help files, to computer tutorials and hypertexts. Maintaining an end-user's perspective throughout, he guides you step by step through every crucial design decision without ever losing sight of the final goal-clear, effective online documentation that people enjoy using. Proven techniques that help reduce support and training costs for software products, eliminate the need for paper documentation, make programs more appealing and easier to use, and more * A practical, hands-on approach, supported by the latest research and supplemented with dozens of case studies and illustrations * Includes new chapters on multimedia and computer-based training * Comprehensive coverage of all online documentation media-words, graphics, animation, and sound * Updated information on organizing and structuring documents-with examples from Windows, OS/2, and Macintosh interfaces
Designed to help processing professionals and technical writers write clear, accurate computer user documentation. Presents a systematic approach to writing paper and online documentation. Version 2 retains much essential material from the first edition, while offering new information on desktop publishing, CASE tools and the ``software factory'' programming technologies. Also covers new techniques such as team writing, hypertext, mass storage and more.
The Art of Technical Documentation presents concepts, techniques, and practices in order to produce effective technical documentation. The book provides the definition of technical documentation; qualities of a good technical documentation; career paths and documentation management styles; precepts of technical documentation; practices for gathering information, understanding what you have gathered, and methods for testing documentation; and considerations of information representation, to provide insights on how different representations affect reader perception of your documents. Technical writers and scientists will find the book a good reference material.
This is a practical guide for software developers, and different than other software architecture books. Here's why: It teaches risk-driven architecting. There is no need for meticulous designs when risks are small, nor any excuse for sloppy designs when risks threaten your success. This book describes a way to do just enough architecture. It avoids the one-size-fits-all process tar pit with advice on how to tune your design effort based on the risks you face. It democratizes architecture. This book seeks to make architecture relevant to all software developers. Developers need to understand how to use constraints as guiderails that ensure desired outcomes, and how seemingly small changes can affect a system's properties. It cultivates declarative knowledge. There is a difference between being able to hit a ball and knowing why you are able to hit it, what psychologists refer to as procedural knowledge versus declarative knowledge. This book will make you more aware of what you have been doing and provide names for the concepts. It emphasizes the engineering. This book focuses on the technical parts of software development and what developers do to ensure the system works not job titles or processes. It shows you how to build models and analyze architectures so that you can make principled design tradeoffs. It describes the techniques software designers use to reason about medium to large sized problems and points out where you can learn specialized techniques in more detail. It provides practical advice. Software design decisions influence the architecture and vice versa. The approach in this book embraces drill-down/pop-up behavior by describing models that have various levels of abstraction, from architecture to data structure design.
Drawing on IBM's unsurpassed technical communications experience, readers discover today's best practices for meeting nine quality characteristics: accuracy, clarity, completeness, concreteness, organization, retrievability, style, task orientation, and visual effectiveness. Packed with guidelines, checklists, and before-and-after examples, Developing Quality Technical Information, Third Edition is an indispensable resource for the future of technical communication.