The Golden 80s

"a substantial number got into the field without having a clear picture about the job they were supposed to do," said a survery conducted several years back. I liked this particular observation because nothing much has changed for the better. Most of the product-based Indian companies do not have a proper technical documentation team. They are also unaware of the importance of technical documentation in marketing their products. Companies do not have guidelines or styles developed to suit their needs. In the absence of credible data on how many Indian technical writers are writing technical documents from scratch and by testing software, it cannot be said that technical writing has arrived in India. Except for a few private training institutes, who make money in the name of training wannabe technical writers, techncial writing is not yet a lucrative profession in India. When compared to the youngsters joining the media, the standard of English demonstrated by young technical...

Let me start with the following example: # include main ( ) { printf ("hello, world\n"); } All C programs starts with the execution of the function main . All C programs must include a function with the name main. The round brackets or parentheses means that main is a function. The empty brackets mean that the function main expects no arguments. The statements of the function are enclosed in curly brackets or braces. C statements are expression statements : an expression followed by a semicolon. For example, i = 0; or i = i + 1; printf prints the characters within the quotes on the screen. Thes characters "hello, world\n" is called a string or character string or string constant. Strings are always put between inverted commas. A semicolon after characters indicates that it is a statement. "n' is the escape sequence, because when ENTER is pressed it goes to the next line and not a new line or paragraph. VARIABLES : In C, there are two main types of vari...