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Perry Moore wonders: <<I recently saw an ad for a TW where it stated that
having experience with Command Line Interfaces was a plus. What are these?
What does one have to know as far as documentation goes? Why would this
experience be a plus? Does anyone have a sample?>>
Ah, how soon the young forget! Why in my day, the evils of MS-DOS and the
struggles of valiant writers against it were the stuff of legend... <gdr>
A command-line interface is one in which you interact with the software by
typing commands rather than mousing around (though even DOS provided hooks
that would let you select from menus using a mouse). Today, the most common
place you'll see this is in places running UNIX (e.g., Web servers),
database query engines, or environments with dumb terminals hooked up to
mainframe computers. The main documentation issues you'll face involve
figuring out how to describe things that the user types rather than choosing
with a mouse (e.g., how do you separate the characters the user types from
the text that says "type these characters"?) and how to organize reference
information (since it won't necessarily be based on the menu order or other
common organizational hooks).
Why would experience be a plus? Because most of us haven't used a command
line in so long that we've forgotten how to write about them from the user's
perspective. That means you'll have to take some time refamiliarizing
yourself with the concept and what that type of user interface means to the
user. Ideally, the employer wants someone who doesn't take long figuring out
how to write in this context, hence the value of experience.
"Technical writing... requires understanding the audience, understanding
what activities the user wants to accomplish, and translating the often
idiosyncratic and unplanned design into something that appears to make
sense."--Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer
