Re: how to handle code as appendices

[Laura Lemay <lemay -at- lauralemay -dot- com>]

Jill Mohan wrote:
> The challenge I am facing is how to handle the code snippets that I have
> been supplied.
> 
> The customer thinks these things should appear as appendices.  But I am
> looking at a lot of appendices right now and growing daily (about 12).
> Should I segment it by type of code, ex. Appendix A - Router config code,
> Appendix B: Oracle code, etc.

Over the last number of years I've been aggressively pushing my clients 
away from including code in documentation at all, other than small 
examples or out-of-context snippets (up to, say 10 lines or so) to 
illustrate specific concepts.  Pages and pages of verbatim code in 
documentation, in my experience, don't get read, are a problem to 
maintain, and are much more practically useful to the audience if they 
are just included online or on the CD with the product and referred to 
in the docs.  In the books I've worked on where we've removed the big 
chapters full of code, no one has ever complained.

But that's not what you actually asked.  :)

In books where we did have lots of code samples it was fine to group 
them together.  We used a numbered code caption, similar to table and 
figure captions, to describe each sample, and a list of examples at the 
start of the book.

Hope this helps.

Laura


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Laura Lemay     Killer of Trees     lemay % lne.com    lemay % gmail.com
http://www.lauralemay.com                     http://blog.lauralemay.com
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