In this exercise, you will give some thought to API documentation, which is possibly the kind of writing that every developer should be able to do.

Pick an API/framework/library/package that your are at least a little familiar with. You don't really have to be familiar with the package, but the goal here isn't really to learn some new API, and if you have actually used the package you'll probably have more insight into how easy it was to work with the docs.

Hopefully you have worked with something outside of your preferred language's standard library. It would be better to find something that's not part of the language's standard library because we're looking toward assignment 2 here, which inherently involves designing and documenting a third-party package.

Some possibilities (but certainly not a complete list):

• The Android SDK (which is huge: pick a small part like the camera API or preference API).
• Ruby on Rails (which is also huge: pick a small part like the Request and Response objects, or part of ActiveRecord).
• One of the popular packages from PyPI, the Python package repository. Maybe Requests, pytz, or pyparsing.

Create a document to answer the questions below. Include a URL to the documentation you're looking at.

Review the Docs

Actually read some of the API documentation. Is all of it clear to you? In this context, “clear” means you understand what the classes represent, understand the description of the methods, and could actually use them in code you're writing.

Is there anything you would change about the documentation? Re-write a few function/method reference descriptions so you think they would be more useful to others.

Submitting

Save/export your work (URL, review, re-written reference) as a PDF. Submit the file to the CourSys activity Exercise 5.