Ask HN: Any great books about technical writing?

#1

Post by iluzone » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

Im looking for a resources (ideally books) that can help juniors, devs and even seniors to improve their technical writing. To help them write better issue descriptions, announcements, documentations, user manuals and so on. How to communicate (in a written form) technical stuff to technical and non-technical people.

Re: Ask HN: Any great books about technical writing?

#2

Post by nullandvoid » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

I've always found DigitalOcean to be a source of very high quality tutorials / documentation, and therefore think you can't go wrong with familiarising yourself with their guidelines https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/digitalocea....

Re: Ask HN: Any great books about technical writing?

#3

Post by jarkz » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 1:51 PM UTC

Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing https://a.co/d/cyI8Y15

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28948131

Re: Ask HN: Any great books about technical writing?

#4

Post by JHonaker » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 1:55 PM UTC

I second the request. I think communication is a drastically underappreciated skill even though we have all suffered due to poor communication professionally (undocumented libraries, poorly specified requirements, an inability to generate buy-in for our ideas).

I'll throw in a few recommendations I have from some recent research at work:

https://eugeneyan.com/writing/writing-docs-why-what-how/

https://eugeneyan.com/writing/ml-design-docs/

https://reqexperts.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/writing_go...

https://eugeneyan.com/writing/what-i-do-before-a-data-scienc...

Re: Ask HN: Any great books about technical writing?

#5

Post by unexist » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 1:56 PM UTC

There are probably dozen of possible books, but I think this one matches your description perfectly:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34927405-living-document...

Just for reference, here is a classic about writing in general:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53343.On_Writing_Well

Re: Ask HN: Any great books about technical writing?

#6

Post by stunt » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 2:01 PM UTC

Google has a course for technical writing, and I think it's a good start.

https://developers.google.com/tech-writing

Re: Ask HN: Any great books about technical writing?

#7

Post by fabiom » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

Though not specifically targeted for developers, I recommend Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sense_of_Style

Re: Ask HN: Any great books about technical writing?

#8

Post by anonymousDan » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

Go buy grammarly pro as a starting point :)

Re: Ask HN: Any great books about technical writing?

#9

Post by lbriner » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 2:16 PM UTC

I think the thing that helped me most was simply to learn more about English (I am a native English speaker) so that I could get an understanding of consistent tense, tone, narrative etc.

I suspect there are good general books on English writing but now I have learned how to write better, I can't believe I found it so difficult before.

Re: Ask HN: Any great books about technical writing?

#10

Post by asicsp » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 2:18 PM UTC

jarkz wrote: post #3

Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing https://a.co/d/cyI8Y15 HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28948131

More HN threads:

"Tips for Writing a Technical Book" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20070558

"How to write a programming book" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23281568

"Learning technical writing using the engineering method" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283919

And a GitHub list: https://github.com/jenniferlynparsons/awesome-writing