"If it's not documented, it didn't happen," is a mantra often heard in the Arm office these days. That's because documentation is important to us at Arm. Because documentation is so important, the Mbed OS 5.6 release included dramatic improvements to our Mbed OS documentation to better serve our users. These improvements include a new documentation site and engine, a new documentation structure and new content.

New website and engine

You can find the Mbed OS 5.6 documentation at os.mbed.com/docs instead of at docs.mbed.com. One benefit of this is that our documentation lives on the developer website instead of at a separate website. Another benefit is that this website contains the same look and feel as the documentation for other products in the Mbed ecosystem. Finally, this site uses a new documentation engine, which adds stability to the process we use to update our documentation.

New structure

For Mbed OS 5.6, we completely restructured our documentation for user experience and to allow growth for future documentation. Benefits of the new structure include clear separation of the Mbed OS codebase and the Mbed OS tools, as well as separation of API reference material and tutorials. The new structure also allows us to standardize our API references for added clarity. Before we restructured the documentation, we collected developer feedback and used that information to guide our plans.

New content

When we collected feedback from our developer community about our documentation, we received many requests for new and expanded documentation. We have begun addressing those requests in the added content in the Mbed OS 5.6 documents onwards. They include information about callbacks, including when to use them and how to create and call them; information about the EventQueue and how it relates to the memory pool; and a document about our release process to assist our contributing developers.

Future plans

This process of improving our documentation has been ongoing for several months. It involved input from our developer community and dedication from many teams at Arm, including documentation, engineering, UX and web. Still, this evolution of our documentation is not complete. We have plans to add future content, which will include more API reference material, expanded content about content, contributing and tools, as well as new content covering memory optimization and power management.

Docs for earlier versions of Mbed OS 5 are still available at docs.mbed.com for the time being. These will be deprecated over time, but the original files will still be available on GitHub. The handbook for Mbed OS 2 remains available at https://os.mbed.com/handbook/Homepage.

As ever, if you see any issues in the Mbed OS docs, please let us know by sending us an email or making the change in GitHub and submitting a pull request. Our guide to contributing to Mbed OS navigates you through the process.