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Discussion on: The Sacred Steps to Achieving Good Documentation

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Doug

Consider writing your docs from the bottom up. Start with an API reference. Then think about the N most important use cases. Create a "Cookbook" section that walks the user through those use cases. Add a "Getting started" section that describes how to install and configure your app/product. Finally, a "Hello world" section that walks the user through the simplest way of knowing they've installed and configured their system correctly.

Don't forget to include a way for people to provide feedback on every page. I find it enormously annoying to hit a feedback button and it does not pre-populate the feedback with some identifying information about the page I was reading.

Then find a few people to vet your docs. Maybe offer a free t-shirt or some other swag.