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Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?

#11

Post by windexh8er »

mobilio wrote: post #4

Definitely - CloudFlare!

I'd say Cloudflare has good documentation, but would be beaten by the likes of HashiCorp. Cloudflare can bounce you around a lot in their documentation. Jumping from their base docs, to GitHub to Docker Hub. In some cases I've found conflicting versioning / information between those sites.

Don't get me wrong, Cloudflare does a nice job. So many vendors today don't have a documentation forward perspective. I recently worked at a startup that had basically no documentation and found that the product was poorly designed and did not work as they advertised it. At this point in my career one of the first things I'm looking for when considering a product or organization is good documentation. Skipping that validation has almost always bitten me. A lack thereof seems to indicate taking a shortcut and broader issues that may be lurking.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?

#12

Post by OldGuyInTheClub »

Not DevTools but Matlab's product documentation is superb. I've learned a lot of signal processing, image processing, communications theory, statistics, and more just from the docs and examples (code, LiveScripts, and Simulink models). Very well written and easy to access from command line, editor, and/or the web.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?

#14

Post by mijamo »

Aperocky wrote: post #5

I like semi-automatically generated docs like AWS API docs that contains in minimum the type information for every field there is, and often much more. I don't like Python docs where it ends up on long winded explanation for specific cases but does not cover all arguments, or only mention some in passing.

I am the exact opposite. I dislike semi automatic docs like most rust libraries have that don't tell you anything about how you're supposed to use things, and I love the general python docs that are the opposite. Django in particular is super good at this.

I would compare it to having a recipe vs a list of ingredients. Both are useful but I can't just cook if you just give me a list of ingredients without instructions.

And then you have NestJS that does neither so you just get a random piece of information but missing 75% of instructions and no good API doc.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?

#19

Post by tomkarho »

I might be stretching the terminology here as far as "technical product documentation" but Arch Wiki has been an absolute blast for me as a source of not only specific distro knowledge but general Linux information. Very concise a yet somehow also very comprehensive.
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