Dave Hickey wondered: <<I'm noticing that many contracts and jobs in
the technical documentation field require an understanding of
programming code. This has always been a weakness for me in my career
since I haven't coded anything since the 80s (in basica of all
things). If I wanted to learn how to write software code so that I'd
be able to write SDK or API documentation, or simply to be able to
read code in order to write the documentation, how would I start
learning that?>>

If you're talking about learning the basics of any standard modern
programming language, such as C, C++, C#, or Java, there are "for
dummies" books available by the dozen. Don't let the title offend you;
I own half a dozen of these books for various programs, and they're
generally excellent. Of course, you might not like the attitude, in
which case you again have many options; the O'Reilly books are all
uniformly excellent in my experience. I was going to suggest you head
over to Camelot and do some browsing, but it looks like they've gone
out of business. Chapters/Indigo or Archambault should give you a
decent selection.

Note, however, that since you learned Basic, you already know that one
programmer's elegant and clear algorithm is a complete mystery to
someone else. This hasn't changed in 30 years so far as I've heard;
programming remains as much art as science. Simply learning what the
programming statements mean won't necessarily tell you a lot about
what a given code module actually does, unless the programmer
documented it clearly as they wrote code. I'm told that this and the
Easter Bunny are both seen in the wild every so often. <g>

That actually suggests a sideways approach that might work: since
programmers hate documenting what they're doing, possibly you could
volunteer to work with them to write the code documentation. That is,
they describe what the module does, and you turn that description into
English and embed that English in the code. They'll love you for it --
at least, when I worked with programmers to write the UI text, they
were always grateful.

You might also want to look into the MIT Open Courseware resource
(http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
). Under the "engineering" links, there are a scad of courses,
including various introductory level courses. Plus, dropping the name
"MIT" gets you serious street cred among programmers.

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Geoff Hart (www.geoff-hart.com)
ghart@... / geoffhart@...
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Effective Onscreen Editing:
http://www.geoff-hart.com/books/eoe/onscreen-book.htm
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