Authors:
Aligns the craft of writing with the craft of programming
Contains easy-to-follow processes, templates, and best practices for creating, organizing, and maintaining documentation
Written by experienced writers and developers from Google, The Linux Foundation, Stripe, LaunchDarkly, and Monzo,
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
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.
Keywords
- Developer documentation
- software documentation
- technical documentation
- technical writing
- design docs
- friction logs
- documentation metrics
- findability
- searchability
- document contributors
- content licenses
- style guides
- code of conduct
- code contributions
- open source contributions
- open source documentation
- open source
Authors and Affiliations
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Berkeley, USA
Jared Bhatti
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Victoria, Canada
Zachary Sarah Corleissen
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Cornwall, UK
Jen Lambourne
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San Francisco, USA
David Nunez
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Mounds View, USA
Heidi Waterhouse
About the authors
Jared Bhatti
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Docs for Developers
Book Subtitle: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing
Authors: Jared Bhatti, Zachary Sarah Corleissen, Jen Lambourne, David Nunez, Heidi Waterhouse
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7217-6
Publisher: Apress Berkeley, CA
eBook Packages: Professional and Applied Computing, Professional and Applied Computing (R0), Apress Access Books
Copyright Information: Jared Bhatti, Zachary Sarah Corleissen, Jen Lambourne, David Nunez, Heidi Waterhouse 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4842-7216-9Published: 01 October 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4842-7217-6Published: 30 September 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXV, 225
Number of Illustrations: 31 b/w illustrations
Topics: Web Development, Open Source