Laufeyjarson writes…

The Best Practices suggest breaking your documentation apart by audience.  Different audiences need different documentation.  It then goes on to suggest where this different documentation belongs… and that’s why my opinion diverges. Read the rest of this entry »

The PBP suggests keeping all the POD at the end of the file.  Considering I feel it should be with the code, I naturally disagree. Read the rest of this entry »

The PBP likes documentation in POD, in your source files, but wants it all in one chunk, separated from the code it documents.  This is one of the suggestions in the PBP I not only disagree with, I find damaging. I feel strongly that the documentation goes as close to the code as possible, to minimize the distance between them and make the tendency to avoid updating them harder to forget. Read the rest of this entry »

The Best Practices suggest putting your documentation in your source files, and provides some reasons.  This is okay. Read the rest of this entry »

The Best Practices make some suggestions on additional things to include in your POD, and suggest those items get listed in your general boilerplates to fill out.  Some of the suggestions are interesting, but I’m not sure they belong in every POD ever. Read the rest of this entry »

The Best Practices suggest creating boilerplates for POD documentation.  They helpfully provide some examples, and suggest differentiating between modules and applications.  I can’t argue with these ideas, particularly when trying to get a group to standardize on a set, but they are not as clear-cut wins in my mind as the book make them out to be. Read the rest of this entry »

This Practice starts off a new section, on documentation.  I think there’s at least one point in this chapter I disagree with Mr. Conway’s conclusions, but we’ll get there presently.  In general, I think he has valuable things to say, and the issues are worth thinking about and deciding on.

Documentation is important, and it’s something many of us are terrible at.

The first Practice he suggests is to be aware there are several kinds of documentation, and to separate the user documentation from the technical documentation. Read the rest of this entry »

The PBP suggests applying a label to each loop that is exited explicitly.  A simple request, but one I usually find vexing. Read the rest of this entry »

This Practice is to encourage the use of a for loop instead of while plus a counter.  It reminds us of redo, a Perl feature I always forget which lets us do the loop over at this iterator.  If the only place the while loop does not increment is to try again, a redo fits perfectly.  If the loop has to do more complex changes to the iterator – back up, start over at zero, whatever – then you’ll sill need the more complex while+counter. Read the rest of this entry »