Developing quality technical information

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1. RheingoldRiverApr 2024
   Developing Quality Technical Information - https://www.amazon.com/Developing-Quality-Technical-Informat...

   My review + some notes - https://river.me/blog/book-review-quality-technical-informat... (it's very good)

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2. RheingoldRiverFeb 2023
   I always suggest Developing Quality Technical Information, and I'll link to both Amazon [0] and my personal review of it [1]. This is the best book about writing I've ever read, and it's significantly improved my writing in concrete ways. One small example is that I no longer put gerunds (verbs ending in -ing as a noun) in any title or heading, because these don't translate well into other languages in such a context and as such may cause a non-native English speaker to slow down in their reading (or mess up your translator's job if they need to do i18n). But there are much more far-reaching changes; I tend to be a lot more concise, delete adverbs, force myself to use parallel structure, etc. As this blog post's author might put it, I'm a lot more judicious about when and where to employ my voice.

   [0] https://www.amazon.com/Developing-Quality-Technical-Informat...

   [1] https://river.me/blog/book-review-quality-technical-informat...

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3. subpixelAug 2022
   Developing Quality Technical Information is a very good foundation: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/developing-quality-tech...
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4. RheingoldRiverFeb 2022
   Not everyone but since this is HN I'll say Developing Quality Technical Information: A Handbook for Writers and Editors. It's intended for technical writers as an audience, and there's a couple chapters developers can skip that are about formatting with pretty diagrams and using DITA and stuff, but at least 80% of it is applicable to all kinds of writing that devs will have to do, and everyone needs to be able to communicate with the written word effectively. Literally every developer should read this book (and everyone should read some writing book relevant to their own field). It's amazing.
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5. RheingoldRiverJun 2021
   If you're looking for good/useful/worthwhile books to read, I would suggest considering UI/UX as well as technical writing topics - a couple personal recommendations:

   * Don't Make Me Think! (UI/UX)

   * Forms That Work (UI/UX)

   * Letting Go of the Words (interface writing / UI/UX)

   * Developing Quality Technical Information: A Handbook for Writers and Editors (technical writing)

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6. BaronSamediJan 2017
   The IBM book "Developing Quality Technical Information" is the best I've read on technical writing. For writing style, pickup any novel by Hemingway and copy it. You can also Google "how to write like Hemingway" for some easy to follow basic rules.

   IMO, however, the biggest problem with most technical writing is not its style but rather the almost complete ignorance of what it should contain and how it should be structured. Open source documentation is a case in point. Some day I will get around to writing an article about documentation anti-patterns, or perhaps a book, given the abundance of examples.

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