This page contains samples of work I've done at various times in my technical writing career. Note that most of these pages have been converted from their original source, so the design and layout is not optimal (and the HTML code is worse).

Tutorials for Sun Java Studio Creator (2004)

I wrote the three introductory tutorials you can view on this web site, as well as the About Components tutorial. Because there were a number of us working on the tutorials, the structure and format were very tightly defined so that the tutorials would be consistent. "Conceptual" tutorials such as Getting Started cover topics without examples or steps; "Walkthrough" tutorials such as Developing a Web Application have procedural steps and an example with no concepts. All the tutorials were written in Star Office and converted to HTML by Sun's Web production team.

N*Able Software Architecture (2000)

A white paper I wrote for N*able technologies, a company that was working on secure smart card products. This document provides a very technical jargon-heavy overview of the product architecture for a technical audience that would be familiar with most of the basic concepts. In Summer of 2000 N*Able was purchased by Wave Technologies.

Regular Expressions in Perl (1998)

A chapter I wrote for Teach Yourself Perl. Regular Expressions allow you to describe a text pattern and then match that pattern inside your data. They are one of the more complex features of Perl and many writers find them very difficult to describe. Many readers have told me this chapter (and the one that followed it in the book) are the best description of regular expressions they have ever seen.

This chapter follows the "Teach Yourself" tutorial format, which is intended to be read from start to finish, and is written in a very conversational format. The audience is beginning programmers. Warning: a long chapter.

"Consider the Source" from Salon.com (1998) (humor)

This is not really technical writing, but has a technical slant to it. When the Netscape source code was released under the Mozilla project in 1998 I was asked by Salon to read the code and do a "review" of it. The concept of a source code review of over a million lines of code in less than a week and also making it interesting for a general audience was kind of daunting, so I ended up doing this piece instead. It's a little dated now.

Column on Image Maps from Web Techniques Magazine

In 1995 and 1996 I was writing short tutorial columns on HTML and Web design for Web Techniques magazine. I didn't have a lot of space for these columns -- 2000 words or so -- so I could only write about short topics. They are written in the same tutorial style as the Teach Yourself books and are intended for beginning and intermediate web designers familiar with HTML.

ScriptX Collections (1994)

This is from a programmer's guide I did a very long time ago, and reflects more of the traditional style that you see in API or programmer's documentation.