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> I'd appreciate any pointers you have to "best of breed"
> developer or API documentation. If you have time to offer
> commentary on what makes it so good, that's all the better.
Hm, "best of breed" is the hard part. I will say, one of my
favorite bits of programmer-oriented tech writing has always been:
In general, the O'Reilly books (www.ora.com) are legendary,
although the last five years they've dropped a bit. I suspect it's as
much from expanding both the number of books in their line as from
expanding their target audience.
I think the essence of what makes a good developer doc is,
everything that makes any good doc, plus great big gobs of conciseness
(concision?). Developer docs are usually about extremely complex
stuff. Going slow is counter-productive because one of the biggest
challenges is getting a clear picture of the thing in your head. With
some topics it's possible to shortcut to this by analogy and metaphor,
but with some topics that just doesn't work.
Every developer also wants copious quantities of practical,
useful, well-documented examples. Unfortunately, all too few books,
in my experience, focus enough on this. There aren't enough examples,
or they aren't practical, or they're poorly documented. Far too
common is examples that are just flat wrong.
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