Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing

Product Description

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.
 

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.