Documenting APIs and SDKs
This one-day in-depth seminar is designed to vastly improve your ability to write documents about programming. It teaches the fundamentals of documenting APIs and SDKs.
This course covers:
- Getting to know APIs and SDKs
- Why software needs APIs
- Generic API features
- Different types of APIs
- Families of functions
- The structure of a programmer's guide
- The 'description frame': the basic API documentation block
- From where do I get the info to document APIs…?
Learn how to design and write professional looking programmer-oriented documentation the way programmers expect to see it. You will learn how to match the look and feel of your API and SDK documentation to the target audience's expectations, so that they can easily and quickly learn how to program with the API and develop using your SDK.
Topics include:
- Attributes, functions, and events; Aliases
- Function parameters and data types
- Constants
- Classes and objects
- Procedural APIs and object-oriented APIs
- Flat APIs and multi-layer APIs
- Dealing with text repetition
- Knowing how much to write
- Time estimates for documenting APIs
- Formatting the description block
- Structuring and ordering the documentation
- Choosing the appearance
- Advanced: Levels of APIs
- Tools
- Examples from Visual Basic, C/C++, Java, .net framework
- The contents of the SDK document
- How to become a better API/SDK document writer
About the Instructor
Avraham Makeler is a software engineer come technical writer and has been programming Word macros and applications for a number of years. Avraham's programming background allows him to add a whole new dimension to Microsoft Word, making it truly dance and sing. Avraham teaches a variety of programming-related seminars at WritePoint.