Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook

In December 2023, I wrote a series called Advent of Technical Writing, in which I published a blog post every day from December 1st to December 24th about technical writing. I am excited to announce the series is now available as an e-book. The e-book contains the 24 articles in the original Advent of Technical Writing series, bonus articles, an exercise, and articles about technical writing I published before the series.

The book is available as a PDF and an epub document, licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.

If you would be interested in a print copy, send me an email at readers [at] jamesg [dot] blog. I am unsure whether I will do a print run, but if enough people are interested I will investigate further.

Below is a summary of the book.

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You may wonder: how can I write technical content? Do I need to be a great coder? Do I need to have a background in writing? Let me answer those last two questions now: no. Writing is all about communication, as I discuss throughout Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook. If you have some technical skills and enjoy refining your communication skills, you have the mindset you need to write technical content.

Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook starts with an introduction to the role of a technical writer. The book then discusses guidance for writing, covering topics from clarity to style to code snippets. Finally, the book discusses how technical writing fits in with the rest of an organisation.

This book is written for people who want to start writing technical documents, or who are early in their careers and are looking to refine their skills. With that said, no matter where you are in your journey with technical writing, Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook contains tactical guidance you can use in your work.