Two thoughts.

The first is that one way to document is to strive to make as little as possible worth documenting. What do I mean by that? Well suppose you write a script, and it has a bunch of dependencies. What is good is if you can make it have as few installation dependencies as possible, and make those as clear as possible. Then you don't have very much to document about how to install it!

The second is to consider ways of combining user documentation and specs. An extreme is the approach that Microsoft has been known to take, of actually writing the user documentation as a spec. Somewhat less extreme is the approach of writing down "use cases" for a spec (this is advocated by extreme programming, among other schools). When you have done that, the use cases are extremely suggestive about what to put into the user documentation.

In reply to Re (tilly) 1: How to write documentation? by tilly
in thread 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.