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.
Does it seem like your Python projects are getting bigger and bigger? Are you feeling the pain as your codebase expands and gets tougher to debug and maintain? Python is an easy language to learn and use, but that also means systems can quickly grow beyond comprehension. Thankfully, Python has features to help developers overcome maintainability woes. In this practical book, author Patrick Viafore shows you how to use Python's type system to the max. You'll look at user-defined types, such as classes and enums, and Python's type hinting system. You'll also learn how to make Python extensible and how to use a comprehensive testing strategy as a safety net. With these tips and techniques, you'll write clearer and more maintainable code. Learn why types are essential in modern development ecosystems Understand how type choices such as classes, dictionaries, and enums reflect specific intents Make Python extensible for the future without adding bloat Use popular Python tools to increase the safety and robustness of your codebase Evaluate current code to detect common maintainability gotchas Build a safety net around your codebase with linters and tests
Anne Gentle's "Conversation and Community" has become the go-to reference for social media and technical communication. Her clear-eyed survey of the social media landscape has been adopted by many universities and is widely used by technical communicators. Now, in this second edition, she has updated and expanded her book, adding chapters on building a content strategy, analyzing web techniques, and developing an open source strategy. With more interviews and case studies, this is your guide to the new world of technical communication and social media. Inside the Book Towards the Future of Documentation Defining a Writer's Role with the Social Web Community and Documentation Commenting and Connecting with Users Wikis as Documentation Systems Finding Your Voice Content Strategy for Community Documentation NEW Chapter Analyzing and Measuring Web Techniques NEW Chapter Open Source Documentation NEW Chapter Concepts and Tools of the Social Web Glossary, Expanded Bibliography, and Index
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python takes the journeyman Pythonista to true expertise. More than any other language, Python was created with the philosophy of simplicity and parsimony. Now 25 years old, Python has become the primary or secondary language (after SQL) for many business users. With popularity comes diversityâ??and possibly dilution. This guide, collaboratively written by over a hundred members of the Python community, describes best practices currently used by package and application developers. Unlike other books for this audience, The Hitchhikerâ??s Guide is light on reusable code and heavier on design philosophy, directing the reader to excellent sources that already exist.
Refactoring is gaining momentum amongst the object oriented programming community. It can transform the internal dynamics of applications and has the capacity to transform bad code into good code. This book offers an introduction to refactoring.
Chapter 5. Knowing What to Comment; What NOT to Comment; Don't Comment Just for the Sake of Commenting; Don't Comment Bad Names--Fix the Names Instead; Recording Your Thoughts; Include "Director Commentary"; Comment the Flaws in Your Code; Comment on Your Constants; Put Yourself in the Reader's Shoes; Anticipating Likely Questions; Advertising Likely Pitfalls; "Big Picture" Comments; Summary Comments; Final Thoughts--Getting Over Writer's Block; Summary; Chapter 6. Making Comments Precise and Compact; Keep Comments Compact; Avoid Ambiguous Pronouns; Polish Sloppy Sentences.
This title shows the process of cleaning code. Rather than just illustrating the end result, or just the starting and ending state, the author shows how several dozen seemingly small code changes can positively impact the performance and maintainability of an application code base.
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.
