Ask HN: Examples of good technical writing?

It's not writing per se, but from a presentation of complex, technical material standpoint - I find 3blue1brown unparalleled

https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown

I don’t have time to expound too much, but I really love America’s Test Kitchen’s two Gluten Free books “The How Can It Be Gluten Free Cookbook” volumes 1 and 2.

Every recipe we’ve tried have been great. But the reason I wanted to share it here is how ATK analyses and shares how they decide the best ingredients for different recipes. Gluten is a very important (and more nuanced than I realized) ingredient in traditional cooking and baking. So when you remove it there are a lot of surprising effects. (And some unsurprising ones). So ATK takes you through those nuances.

It’s really fun to learn and I’m not much of a cook myself :)

Douglas Hofstadter's work provides several examples.

* Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (GEB)

* Metamagical Themas

* I Am A Strange Loop (IAASL)

GEB and IAASL are thematically similar, and both are worth a read if you're interested in both Gödel's theorems (plus related work eg Church-Turing) and Hofstadter's philosophy of mind. GEB is a lot more creative and fun; IAASL does a better job of communicating the key technical ideas like incompleteness.

Metamagical Themas is a collection of shorter work, generally technical and fun.

Although Hofstadter was the first to come to my mind, these other authors/works also provide fun and/or excellent examples of technical writing:

* Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line"

* Velleman's "How To Prove It" and "Philosophies of Mathematics"

* Mittelbach & Goosens "The LaTeX Companion"

* Waldrop's "The Dream Machine"

* Nielsen & Chuang's "Quantum Computation & Quantum Information"

* Lakatos's "Proof & Refutations"

* Chambers "What is this thing called science?"

* Doxiadis & Papadimitriou's "Logicomix".

Common Lisp the Language: 2nd Edition by Guy Steele. It's a bit hard to come by as a physical copy (I ordered mine from Abe Books), but it's a fantastic example of technical writing in many facets. I pretty much read it cover to cover (skimming over some of the more reference-y material).

What I found particularly unique about it was the way it highlighted changes made to the language since the first edition. Instead of having a notes section at the back or asides scattered throughout, it's structured like a redlined document (although much easier to read). Paragraphs that are no longer relevant are marked with a dotted vertical line in the margin, while additions are marked with a solid vertical line. Typically you'll see a removed section immediately followed by an addition that'll note something to the effect of "X3J13 voted to remove this from the language in July 1988..." and it'll go on to explain why that happened. Reading about all of the votes really hammered home the fact that Common Lisp was a compromise between many different organizations and dialects. So not only did it help me better understand Common Lisp, it helped me appreciate why Common Lisp is the way it is.

Microsoft Access! I haven't touched that in years.