Writing READMEs

Approx. 3 days

In this course, you’ll learn what documentation is and why it’s an important part of the development process. You'll learn how to build a well-structured README that you’ll be able to incorporate into your projects moving forward. By the end of this course, you will have written your very own README file using Markdown.

If you've ever written code or needed to examine somebody else's code, you know how challenging it can be to try to make sense of a new codebase without any context.

This course will show you how to make your code more approachable to the humans who will ultimately need to make meaning of your code.

This course is for anybody who writes code or works with others who do. The only prerequisites are:

• A basic understanding of HTML
• A basic understanding of git and GitHub (helpful, but not required!)

See the Technology Requirements for using Udacity.

This course is split into three short stages:

1. What is documentation, and who is it for?
2. What makes a good README?
3. How can you write a README quickly using Markdown?