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Subject:Re: What are "advanced" API topics? From:Sandy Harris <sandy -at- storm -dot- ca> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 29 May 2001 20:16:12 -0400
Lydia Wong wrote:
>
> I want to second one of Walden's topics:
>
> > 4. Creating tutorials or creating walk-throughs--what's the difference
> > (i.e., will a programmer ever really create code for the sake of
> > learning a product)
>
> This touches on a big problem in API docs: balancing the need for "fully
> documenting" the API and our users' feverish requests for more code samples.
I've more than once been told the code samples are the most (sometimes, the
only) useful part of an API doc.
> We writers at our company don't have enough time to do a lot of both of
> these things, so we try to balance it. ...
On one contract, I got my manager to agree in writing to some things I thought
were important principles:
All examples in the doc must come from running, tested, programs.
There is no other way to ensure they are correct. Kernighan and
Pike mention this policy in one of their excellent books.
Those programs should be provided as complete examples in the
distribution.
I don't have to write them. In this case, I could have, but that
wasn't what they were paying me for.
Unfortunately, the development manager didn't think this was what they were
paying his programmers for either, so this led to some conflicts.
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