The future of technical documentation
In an essay that is bound to become a classic, titled “Splitting Books Open“, O’Reilly editor Andy Oram ponders the future of technical documentation and offers an intriguing glimpse of things to come to budding technical writers, publishers and developers alike.
Andy first defines The Text, to wit, the epitome of the traditional documentation, thusly,
a timeless, unalterable artifact to be approached with reverence[..]. The original Text consisted of the five books of Moses. We have added many other works to this revered status: the writings of Homer, Shakespeare, and so forth.[..]
Only a few achievements in technical documentation have reached the status of The Text: Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, Kernighan and Ritchie’s book on C, and perhaps a few others such as Charles Petzold’s book on Windows programming. Books with words such as “Bible” in their titles come nowhere near canonical status.
Andy then spends a lot of pixels exhaustively discussing the merits and flaws of traditional (printed), as opposed to community (electronic) documentation, plugs Safari Bookshelf, heaps a battery of sage advice on all parties involved in the process and finishes up with a righteous moral appeal:
Think of ourselves as a community. We are all responsible for educating each other.
The Technical Communication Forum also has a large repository of past articles dealing with various subjects of interest to technical writers.
