Introduction
Much of the content in this chapter was adapted from Nathan Bean’s CIS 400 course at K-State, with the author’s permission. That content is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
One of the strategies for combating the challenges of the software crisis is writing clear documentation to support both the end-users who will use the program, as well as other developers who will update and maintain the code. Today, including high-quality documentation along with your code, both in the form of code comments and other external documentation, is seen as an important practice among software developers, especially those working on large projects with multiple developers.
In this chapter, we’ll learn about these terms:
- User Documentation
- Developer Documentation
- HTML
- Markdown
- XML
- Code Comments
- Javadoc
- Python Docstrings
- Generated Documentation
After this chapter and the associated example project, we should be able to write effective documentation within our code using the correct format for our chosen programming language.