Documentation

Paper documentation, to me, is an example of user-interface design. When I design a document to be printed, I follow many of the same principles as when I am designing an on-screen environment. Each format — screen and print — has its own conventions for presenting information in a useful way, and I try to follow as many of those as I can. Just as I model computer screens after well-known, similar-looking screens in the user's environment, I model printed documents after similar documents — tutorials, textbooks, dictionaries, user's manuals, and so on.

Of the documents whose source files I still have, I feel the following are good examples of how I lay out information:

• The Blacksmith Tutorial. A lesson, with examples, on how to use Blacksmith, a programmable screen-scraping tool for the Macintosh.

• Review: Dynamic Web Sites. A compilation of most of my handouts for the web-development course I teach at the DeVry Institute of Technology. Originally written for a 1-day summary of the coruse. Provides an overview of the process of building data-driven web sites.
  

• A tutorial on writing SQL from within ASP. In my experience writing n-tier applications, it is frequently necessary to write a computer program which talks to another computer system. This means that you have to teach your program how to speak some other program's language. This tutorial, an excerpt from the Review document above, gives a specific example of that, by walking the student through the evolution of such a piece of code.

• The design document for the task scheduling program described in the Information Architecture section.

• The mainframe GUI proposal described in the UI Design section.