Re: Improving your skills by reading module sources

[davies]

I recently did some work on an Excel TDD harness (here), and I found it very useful to take some code that was not well documented and write documentation for it, both technical and user. I have often heard that documentation is better when written by someone other than the original programmer, and there are comments in this thread about how poor some of the documentation is. By following this approach, a number of benefits are available, if the module is being maintained. First and most obviously, the community benefits from the documentation. Second, if I were the author of anything on CPAN, I would respond much more favourably to someone who wrote "I'm trying to improve the documentation. Have I understood this properly?" (especially if shown draft documentation) than to "I'm a beginner and don't understand". Third, the code is getting a review that might identify bugs. Even if they aren't fixed, it is useful to have them documented.

Regards,

John Davies

[Tux]

++!

As a side note, I notice that the more complicated my modules are/get, the better my documentation gets, because I have to read the documentation myself to know how to use what I wrote myself. Yes, a system can get complicated or expressive enough for even the author not to use all edge cases.

Especially when you write/wrote a feature to please someone else, and never saw a (good) use-case yourself, a day may come you think "didn't I implement something like this already?" and then you read your own docs. Proceless!