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Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?

#11

Post by kaba0 »

gsliepen wrote: post #7

For C and C++: cppreference.com. Why? - Very good overview pages. - Everything is cross-referenced. - Almost everything comes with an example of how to use it. - It's a wiki, so you can edit it yourself if you find anything lacking.

Maybe it’s just me being stupid, but cppreference, while absolutely of great quality, some c++ pages can be as cryptic as it gets. I know, the language is very much not trivial due to all these features, but for example the page about the different kind of l/rvalues is very very complex.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?

#12

Post by userbinator »

omnicognate wrote: post #6

I don't have a view on SDK documentation but the best API documentation I've read is the Win32 docs. Why? They are comprehensive, detailed, consistent, systematically presented, clearly explained and professionally written. Microsoft documentation has sadly gone steeply downhill since.

I still use Win32.hlp for most of my reference needs.

Microsoft documentation has sadly gone steeply downhill since.

I heard they decided to get rid of most of their documentation writers, and instead rely on "the community" to do it for them. And this horrible migration to a new system, which was basically an act that only the team doing it seems to be proud of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11626886

Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?

#13

Post by aeturnum »

I'm extremely fond of the official Elixir documentation - it's easy to read, has a standard structure, and most importantly (to me) you can click the "code symbol" () to go to the actual implementation of the function documented.

https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Enum.html#flat_map/2

Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?

#15

Post by srik »

Tailwind. Since tailwind classes expand to css, they could've called it a day by just showing those expansions, but they went further and each class has it's own section and every variant comes with an explanation, often accompanied with illustrations even. Their designer roots show too, because the illustrations are tight. Honestly, one could potentially skip having to refer to css docs and make do with just tailwind's.

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation

Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?

#19

Post by ihaveajob »

Stripe's documentation was terrific when we were doing our initial integration. Clear descriptions, frequent use cases were described and indexed so they're easy to find, and the code samples (in 6-8 languages) are copy-paste ready using your own pre-populated credentials.
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