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

Learn 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. This new edition has been fully updated and edited taking into account the needs for developers and tech writers today, with new content relating to AI, automation and LLMs. 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 Learn to:  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 Understand where (and where not) to integrate AI into your documentation workflow This Book Is For  Developers who need to create documentation alongside code, or for technical writers, product managers, community managers, developer advocates, and other technical roles who create and contribute to documentation.   ‘This book is like Strunk & White for writing tech docs’ —Tom Johnson, Senior Technical Writer, Google ‘As AI reshapes how people find and consume information, understanding your users and writing docs that serve them is critical – and Docs for Developers makes that entire process accessible to any team.’ —Tal Gluck, Developer Advocate, GitBook and co-author, State of Docs report