Technical Writing: How to Write API Software Documentation

Are you a technical writer who needs to write API software documentation? Do you wonder what you need to prepare and deliver to have high-quality API documentation and do not know where to start?

If yes, then this course is for you!

API stands for Application Programming Interface. An interface is a software abstraction, which allows two software applications to communicate with each other seamlessly.

There are two roles you need to consider when you write documentation about an API:

1. The role of the developer who created the API. This developer needs to provide information about the way the API is supposed to work; what requests can it receive and what responses does is provide.
2. The role of the developer who uses the API. This developer needs to read through the API documentation to understand the ways to connect to the API, the requests that he or she can send to the API, and the responses that the API shall return for these requests.

In this course, you will learn:

• What is API and API documentation – explained in a way so that you can understand. No special programming knowledge is required! 
• Which are the steps you need to follow to prepare and provide documentation about your API – a small framework to make sure you have steps to follow while preparing the API documentation.
• Hints about 2 popular tools you can use to test an API and generate API documentation automatically. In the interest of saving you time, we shall just provide an overview of tools, such as Postman and Swagger, but we are not going into details about using these tools – they are already well documented and there are many courses about using these tools.

Try it now, and see how easy it is to write API documentation, once you know which are the basic steps to follow!