Tutorial Stats

Tutorial is great way to help user to get started. It takes user through a series of steps demonstrating a particular use case, introduces the main project concepts and shows how to apply them. Tutorial is the first entry point for many developers and is a critical part of project's developer experience.

Best practices

Best practices

1. Set the goals

  • Come up with a simple project based on a real-life example or a common use case of your product and build it
  • State the goals early and show the result as early as possible
  • By the end the reader should be in a position to make sense of the rest of the documentation
Examples:   Auth0 ,   Django ,   Kubernetes ,   Jekyll

2. Prepare the reader

  • Think about the kind of users, their prior knowledge and use cases you expect. Don't assume too much or too little.
  • Describe the expected prior/prerequisite knowledge, provide links to educational resources on the topic
  • Introduce high-level concepts specific to your product, but only if they are required for this tutorial
  • Unfamiliar acronyms should be explained with links or full phrases

3. Describe installation process

  • List expected dependencies (runtime, OS, libraries)
  • Explain how to install the software
  • Explain how to create and configure an account (if needed)
  • Cover various operating systems, platforms

Apply this and many other checklists to your project