What is programmer documentation

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How that's changing the customer and employee experience Artificial Intelligence. Xero posts half-year net loss as investment in product development grows Cloud. This applies to all variables, as well as to fields of structure declarations. Complex sections of code and any other parts of the program that need some explanation should have comments just ahead of them or embedded in them.

Miscellaneous Requirements: Write programs with appropriate modularity; that is, create classes when appropriate, write methods that accomplish limited, well-defined tasks, etc. Indent bodies of methods, loops and IF statements, and do so with a single, consistent style. Like global variables, unconditional branching e. I think the key point here is that writing is hard. For everyone. Especially if you expect to create useful documentation in your first draft.

New tools like Notion and Roam do feature a strong focus on networking and collaboration. There are many editors like StackEdit or Dillinger that make creating Markdown relatively easy. This is one of the reasons I like Google Docs for documentation. It is great for writing but just horrible for collaboration and discovery.

This is not contradictory at all. Google provides good tools for creating documents, but these documents just sit there. You nailed it on the reasons — especially that it is hard. Documentation especially good documentation requires deep work and most developers heck anyone has lost the ability to do deep work. My experience is that all too often there is too much discussion about documentation getting in the way of actually doing it.

Where to put it. How to organize it. Blah blah blah. Things I would like to see is an overview of the layout. Then documentation that follows said layout. Small stuff needs small documentation. Larger stuff…. You must be logged in to post a comment. Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash. Post Views: 53, Log in to Reply. I was confused by these two sentences: This is one of the reasons I like Google Docs for documentation.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment. Do you feel comfortable or overwhelmed? Is there any vocabulary you don't understand? It's a lot of information right?! You might notice that each has a sort of table of contents to the right or left of the main content. Its pretty easy to find getting started tutorials for Canvas and React while you have to dig a little to find the same for jQuery.

If you were overwhelmed by any of these docs, don't worry. Experienced developers sometimes take understanding documentation for granted, as if it's an instinct all developers are born with. But, developer documentation isn't like a lot of instruction sets we are used to using outside of development. Plus, not all documentation is created equally. Sometimes documentation is written by developers who are good at writing instructions that computers can understand, but not so much that people can understand.

And, as we saw from the examples above, different sets of documentation are organized differently. So, when looking at a new set of documentation, the first thing we have to do is figure out how it is organized. This can be one of the first places we can encounter frustration. The key to effectively navigating documentation is knowing how good documentation is organized.

According to Pamela Fox , in her post called The Six Pillars of Complete Developer Documentation , a complete documentation set should try to include the following:.

I lifted this list from linked article above with no intention to claim it as my own. Just for your convenience!

Not all documentation includes all of these things, but you can use the above list to get yourself oriented and to evaluate the quality of the documentation you're referencing. Maybe if what you're looking at is missing a lot from the list above you can find better docs somewhere else.

If there is no better alternative documentation, maybe you can try to find another similar library with better docs. If that isn't an option, hopefully this list can at least help you set realistic expectations for the docs available to you and ease any unnecessary frustration. See the end of this post for more on what to do if the docs you're using are really bad. As you read through the Class Reference, keep in mind that learning method names and arguments by heart probably isn't worth the time.

I've been building JavaScript apps for several years and there are lots of things I still have to look up. Over time you'll start to remember the methods you use most, but there is no need to start out by trying to memorize everything. You don't need to and no one should ever expect this of you. It is far more helpful to skim through the Class Reference headings and get an idea for what types of methods it contains.

You'll likely start to pick up on the patterns used to name things. Each of these begin with getElement. Those with singular Element in the name return a single HTML object, while those with plural Elements in the name return a nodelist. Having a sense of what a method would be named, and what it might return based on its name, makes it easier for you to search for something even if you you aren't sure that it exists.

When using documentation to find answers, we first need to think about what kinds of questions we are asking. You may come to documentation for a number of different reasons and depending on the situation, you can optimize your approach to reading through the docs. In this scenario, you've likely just heard about a new thing and your questions might be "What is it? The front page usually contains a summary of the software. Let's take the Canvas API docs , for example. Right away we learn what canvas is, what it's used for, and what browser support looks like.

The nice thing about this page too is that it immediately provides a code example. Browsing the headings of the Table of Contents or Class Reference can give us an idea of how large the library is and what types of methods it contains.