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Subject:Re: Good Manuals - Why Rare. From:Chris Hamilton <cah_91 -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com Date:Thu, 16 Mar 2000 05:49:59 -0800 (PST)
>> Scottie Lover said:
....If you hand a good programmer a well-written user
guide [written by a competitor company],he can
probably use it to create a system which would
otherwise have taken years to put together.
Chris responds:
Do you really think so? I'm not being fecetious, but I
am struggling with this.
Depending on the product, my assumption is that you
shouldn't innundate the reader with details about the
internals, except on a need-to-know basis. I need to
test that theory, it seems. From a business
standpoint, this seems like something you _wouldn't_
want to do. I guess my question is, _should_ we write
to enough detail to let someone reverse engineer the
product? My initial thought is that we shouldn't, but
I'm willing to be trained by people with more wisdom
and experience than I have.
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