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Perspectives on Software Documentation: Inquiries and Innovations
Edited by Thomas T. Barker
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Baywood's Technical Communications Series, Jay R. Gould, Series Editor
IN PRAISE OF
"Thomas Barker and a distinguished team of contributors provide something
different
—a compendium of recent intellectual and practical trends in
the field. The book will be most useful, I think, for students of technical
communication, researchers in both university settings and the computer
industry, and anyone else interested in taking stock of the current state
of knowledge and the future possibilities of theory and practice in software
documentation. Barker has performed a significant service for the field
by soliciting the chapters and editing this interesting volume...To his
credit, the editor of this collection has selected chapters based in both
cognitive science and ecological or social psychology. He allows diverse
perspectives to thrive in a dialectical, or complementary, relation within
the covers of a single book. For this reason
—and because of the sheer
originality and quality of many of the contributions—the book is a valuable
source of research questions and researchable observations. It also contains
some fine practical advice. This breadth of coverage makes the book both
useful and provocative for anyone who writes, uses, or studies software
documentation."
—Jimmie Killingsworth, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
ABOUT THE BOOK
Two unmistakable trends in software documentation emerge from the academic
literature of the last few years. The first trend is toward usability as
the standard for all software documentation.
The second trend is toward online presentation as the primary and preferred
medium for software documentation.
As we shall see, this medium allows a number of new interface elements
to fall under the broad umbrella of software documentation. In fact, the
evidence of these trends tends to suggest that we need to broaden our definition
of software documentation. It is toward this broadening that this book
inclines.
This book is designed to address the randomness of the literature on
software documentation. As anyone interested in software documentation
is aware, the field is highly synthetic; information about software documentation
may be found in engineering, computer science training, technical communication,
management, education and so on. Perspectives on Software Documentation
contains a variety of perspectives, all tied together by the shared need
to make software products more usable.
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Toll free order line: 800-638-7819 |
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Email: info@baywood.com |
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