[dba-Tech] Writing Technical Documentation

Jim Lawrence accessd at shaw.ca
Wed Sep 4 22:17:21 CDT 2013


Hi Arthur:

"Read the source code"... If you can read the source code and it makes perfect sense, you don't need docs because you have already fully learned. It is almost like a Catch22 argument.

Teaching is a real art. If the programmer designer is really good then the chances are their documentation style skips over much of the details but OTOH, if the documentation is written by a non-programmer, they don't skip over any of the details. In both cases the docs are poor at best.

Jim 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Arthur Fuller" <fuller.artful at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" <dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 4, 2013 12:22:18 PM
Subject: [dba-Tech] Writing Technical Documentation

Steve Losh has posted a nice article on writing tech-docs for programming
languages and libraries. When I think back on some of the lib-docs I wrote,
I wish that I had read this back then.

See http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/09/teach-dont-tell/.

-- 
Arthur
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