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Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing Paperback – 1 Oct. 2021
Jared Bhatti (Author) See search results for this author |
Zachary Sarah Corleissen (Author) See search results for this author |
Jen Lambourne (Author) See search results for this author |
David Nunez (Author) See search results for this author |
Heidi Waterhouse (Author) See search results for this author |
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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.
- ISBN-101484272161
- ISBN-13978-1484272169
- Edition1st ed.
- Publication date1 Oct. 2021
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions15.49 x 1.45 x 23.5 cm
- Print length250 pages
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Product description
From the Back Cover
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.
You will:
- 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
About the Author
Jared Bhatti
Jared is a Staff Technical Writer at Alphabet, and the co-founder of Google’s Cloud documentation team. He’s worked for the past 14 years documenting an array of projects at Alphabet, including Kubernetes, App Engine, Adsense, Google’s data centers, and Google’s environmental sustainability efforts. He currently leads technical documentation at Waymo and mentors several junior writers in the industry.
Zachary Sarah Corleissen
Zach began this book as the Lead Technical Writer for the Linux Foundation and ended it as Stripe’s first Staff Technical Writer. Zach served as co-chair for Kubernetes documentation from 2017 until 2021, and has worked on developer docs previously at GitHub, Rackspace, and several startups. They enjoy speaking at conferences and love to mentor writers and speakers of all abilities and backgrounds.
Heidi Waterhouse
Heidi spent a couple decades at Microsoft, Dell Software, and many, many startups learning to communicate with and for developers. She currently works as a principal developer advocate at LaunchDarkly, but was reassured to find that technical communication is universal across all roles.
David Nunez
David heads up the technical writing organization at Stripe, where he founded the internal documentation team and wrote for Increment magazine. Before Stripe, he founded and led the technical writing organization at Uber and held a documentation leadership role at Salesforce. Having led teams that have written about cloud, homegrown infrastructure, self-driving trucks, and economic infrastructure, he’s studied the many ways that technical documentation can shape the user experience. David also acts as an advisor for several startups in the knowledge platform space.
Jen Lambourne
Jen leads the technical writing and knowledge management discipline at Monzo Bank. Before her foray into fintech, she led a community of documentarians across the UK government as Head of Technical Writing at the Government Digital Service (GDS). Having moved from government to finance, she recognizes she’s drawn to creating inclusive and user-centred content in traditionally unfriendly industries. She likes using developer tools to manage docs, demystifying the writing process for engineers, mentoring junior writers, and presenting her adventures in documentation at conferences.
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Product details
- Publisher : Apress; 1st ed. edition (1 Oct. 2021)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 250 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1484272161
- ISBN-13 : 978-1484272169
- Dimensions : 15.49 x 1.45 x 23.5 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 138,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 50 in UNIX & Linux
- 64 in Computer Operating Systems (Books)
- 162 in Editing Reference
- Customer reviews:
About the authors
Zach (he/they) is a technical writer based in Victoria, British Columbia. Zach is currently a staff technical writer at Stripe, where he solves complex documentation challenges, mentors other writers, and dreams of returning to in-person conferences. Zach's previous documentation work includes Kubernetes, cloud native projects at the Linux Foundation, GitHub, Rackspace, a handful of Seattle startups, and others. Zach holds an M.Div and devotes his spare time to roleplaying games, knitting, swimming, and gardening.
Jen leads the technical writing and knowledge management discipline at Monzo Bank. Before her foray into fintech, she led a community of documentarians across the UK government as Head of Technical Writing at the Government Digital Service (GDS). Having moved from government to finance, she recognizes she’s drawn to creating inclusive and user-centred content in traditionally unfriendly industries. She likes using developer tools to manage docs, demystifying the writing process for engineers, mentoring junior writers, and presenting her adventures in documentation at conferences.
David heads up the technical writing organization at Stripe, where he founded the internal documentation team and wrote for Increment magazine. Before Stripe, he founded and led the technical writing organization at Uber and held a documentation leadership role at Salesforce. Having led teams that have written about cloud, homegrown infrastructure, self-driving trucks, and economic infrastructure, he’s studied the many ways that technical documentation can shape the user experience. David also acts as an advisor for several startups in the knowledge platform space.
Heidi Waterhouse is a technical writer, developer advocate, and world-recognized speaker. Her most prolific writing by volume is to-do lists. She lives in the midwest with her wife, kids, and three cats who like to scream during recording sessions.
Jared Bhatti is a technical writer at Alphabet based in San Francisco, California. He’s worked for the past 15 years documenting an array of projects including Kubernetes, Google Cloud, Google’s data centers, and Google’s environmental sustainability efforts. He currently leads technical documentation at Waymo and mentors several junior writers in the industry. He holds degrees in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and an MBA focused on sustainability.
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It is shockingly thin, especially considering the line spacing and the font size. There doesn't seem to be any discussion or nuance, just do this followed by that.
Usually I wouldn't have left a review, but I bought this book on the basis of the review, and could have done with a more critical review at the time. Would not recommend this book.
This really changed the way I thought about documentation and I've been doing it for ages.
So I guess you really can teach an old doc new tricks!