Hi all, this question may seem basic, and obvious, but I couldn't find anything useful on SuperSearch.

I'm involved in a web project and I'm writing stuff to glue it together. In the event of me being squashed by a bus tomorrow, I want my employer to be able to use what I've written, and fix/extend it with time.

At the moment there are no other Perl or web people in the team, the project is an out growth of the SAP team. With time there will be non-technical users as well, but barring an unfortunate incident with a bus, I don't expect the permenant Perl/Apache/Web team ever to grow beyond me.

What kind of documents are useful? I need to document the project so people can use it and extend/fix it, so I assume I need at least two kinds of docs: technical and user.

Every script I write is commented and had POD, obviously, but that's not much use to most people at the moment. At every change as I go along, I print out hard copy, and file it, generate HTML from POD, as well as archiving it.

I'm also building an intranet "how-to" users guide as I go along, with examples and user instructions. I'm not a technical writer, and as everyone knows it's easy to forget to mention something that you as the author knows..

So my questions:

What strategies have monks found helpful in their projects, both user and tech docs?

When you inherited projects, what helped you carry on?

Any books or web sites to suggest for small projects of this nature?

As ever, humble thanks in advance...

In reply to How to write documentation? by ajt

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.