The Developer's Guide to Reading Coding Docs

Picture this:

• You’re working on some new functionality. You know what you need to do, but aren’t sure if someone’s already written a function for that.
• Something changed upstream and now you really need to send different parameters to a function – will it still work?
• You heard someone mention a method and it might be exactly what you need, but you’re not entirely sure how to use it.

What do you do? Take a look, it’s in a book! Well, in the coding docs, anyway.

Language and function references, API docs – Developers need to be comfortable reading them and knowing how to find the answers to their questions. It’s not always easy, or obvious, however. If you’re new to coding, or just new to Drupal or PHP, it can be especially tricky to pin down the information you need and to know where to look.

In this session we’ll take a look at the Drupal.org API reference pages as well as at the documentation on PHP.net to see:

• What types of information these sources contain
• Where to look to find specific types of information
• Any gotchas or things to watch out for

We’ll also touch briefly on an idealized high-level model for a coding reference page. We’ll talk about what should be there, and why -- so that the next time you’re the one writing the docs, you’ll leave nothing but happy devs in your path.