Documenting
Documentation is one of the most critical, but overlooked areas of open source devlopment. This is true in respects of both developer documentation and end user documentation, which are both needed to make a project viable. Documentation for Haiku is published via a number of means, depending on its intended purpose and spans various subjects.
Check out the following areas where we need help our documentation:
The Haiku User Guide
The Haiku User Guide is intended to help new users navigate the operating system; point out areas where Haiku differs from other desktop operating systems and to provide tutorials (called 'workshops') to power users so that they can use more advanced features of the operating system.
Related to this is the Haiku Welcome Page, which aims to help a users when they boot Haiku for the first time. It is provided on the desktop and links to other resources such as the Haiku User Guide.
You can help create new content by introducing yourself to the documentation team on their discussion list. If you want report a spelling mistake, a graphical issue or to request a new feature; then you can submit a new ticket to the Haiku development tracker and select the 'Documentation' category in the 'Component' drop down box.
The General Guides
There are a number of short guides on the main Haiku website that detail how to get Haiku up and running. They cover subjects such as compiling Haiku from source code, booting and installing Haiku, updating Haiku and emulating Haiku on a virtual computer.
Because these resources are located on the main Haiku website, an account for the main site is needed with permissions that allow you to edit pages in the content management system (Currently Drupal). You will need permissions to edit and create the 'wiki-like' pages to modify these guides and permissions for the 'article' pages to modify higher ranking pages.
If you want to help with these guides you can get the necessary permissions by introducing yourself to the documentation team on their discussion list. If you want report a mistake, a broken link or to suggest a new guide; then you can submit a new ticket to the Haiku development tracker and select the 'Documentation' category in the 'Component' drop down box.
The Haiku programming books
There are two books (nicknamed in Haiku lingo as Book1 and Book2) written by Jon Yoder (DarkWyrm) which introduce readers to C++ (Learning to Program with Haiku) and to the BeAPI (Programming with Haiku). You can report issues in the comment section of each chapter or to the author directly.
The Haiku Book
The Haiku Book is the documentation on the Application Programming Interface (API) of the Haiku operating system. This API describes the internals of the operating system allowing developers to write native C++ applications and device drivers. The Haiku API is based on the BeOS R5 API but changes and additions have been included where appropriate.
You can help create new content by introducing yourself to the documentation team on their discussion list. If you want report a coding mistake or to request a new feature; then you can submit a new ticket to the Haiku development tracker and select the 'Documentation' category in the 'Component' drop down box.
As this is more technical writing, a style guide is provided which explains how to document the API. Its intended audience are the Haiku developers who want to document their own classes, and also the members of the API Documentation team who want to brush up the documentation.
HaikuPorts Guides
There are a number of guides on the HaikuPort website that help when working with the Haiku build recipes, the HaikuPorter tool and also for porting software to Haiku in general.
To help with the HaikuPorts Guides, you only have to join GitHub to suggest changes. If you want to really get cracking, then you should introduce yourself to the HaikuPorts team on their discussion list.