This short book offers good guidance for writing software manuals. It is intended as a guide for anyone involved in technical writing that supports software products. The book would be of particular value to those who do not have much experience writing user documentation, but there is much good advice for experienced authors as well.

The author assumes that readers have the needed technical knowledge in the software field and concentrates on writing style. There is a heavy emphasis throughout the book on the need for authors to focus on their intended audience in making decisions about appropriate style, tone, vocabulary, and so forth. The author suggests that one purpose of this guide is to provide advice particularly aimed at European audiences. I am not certain what the difference is, except that there are various comments having to do with adopting a writing style that lends itself to easy translation into other languages.

The book contains ten chapters. Those chapters essentially cover a six-step approach that the author uses for writing software manuals. The steps are analyzing the audience, making an outline definition, making a detailed definition, choosing a style and format, writing the manual, and testing the manual. The concluding chapter briefly presents some advice about writing online documentation.

The book is clear, concise, and well written. It makes good use of examples to clarify various points. I had only one minor problem. The book includes an appendix, but I could see no purpose for the appendix other than possibly to illustrate how an appendix should appear in a manual.