The Windows 3.1 SDK. I bought and read it at University, some decades ago, and I can still write simple C programs for Windows that compile under Windows 2000 and run under Windows 10.
Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?
21–30 of 51 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?
#22The TeX-Book. Really fun read that presents the system with exercises that are approachable.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?
#23I find the Qt documentation to be excellent. If only Microsoft rose to the same level of helpfulness.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?
#24RISC OS Programmer's Reference Manual. It's very well laid out, clearly written and consistent. In fact, I even bought myself a copy all these years later to peruse for nostalgia.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?
#25This will be an unusual answer: the Inform documentation. It is some of the best, most compelling technical prose I've ever read. The stability of it is very calming when everything else in programming is in a perpetual state of simultaneous development and deprecation.
The two books are "Writing with Inform" and "The Inform Recipe Book":
https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/book/WI_1_1.html
https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/book/RB_1_1.html
Inform is a weird beast: it is a domain-specific language for writing interactive fiction stories, with natural English language syntax. But underneath there's an object model and datatypes and you can use it as a general-purpose language: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/inform7/
Additionally, there's "The Inform Designer's Manual", which is for an earlier version using a more standard programming language syntax:
Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?
#26The Android SDK is well documented with examples throughout and hyperlinked to examples and posts which explain some content in greater depth.
Really? Most of it seems to be machine generated from the code definitions - very little explanation, very little usage info. I find it terrible.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?
#27Nobody would call it an "SDK" but I find the Emacs/Elisp documentation to be excellent both on the docstring level and the manuals. It has been refined over several decades, it is thorough, well written and very easy to use from the comfort of Emacs itself.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?
#28The man pages to NetBSD. I don't think I've seen such comprehensive documentation in all my born days. Every command, API, data structure, and concept in the base system is thoroughly documented. I managed to write a toy device driver and incorporate it into the kernel, using nothing but the man pages.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?
#29When I was 10, I got my first computer. A Commodore VIC 20. The book that came with the machine taught me programming. It was very well written and already at 11 I could program quite well. I wish we could take more inspiration from that period when writing modern documentation.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best SDK documentation you’ve ever read?
#30I suspect that the PHP documentation has been the most effective.
I know everyone likes hating on PHP, but the docs actually work very well.
Part of it is because the language is basically a big standard library of functions, and those are easy to document, but the integration of user comments into each page has also been extremely useful to me.
Inside Macintosh (Apple's original system docs) was very good. Apple's documentation has steadily degraded, since. The documentation for SwiftUI is basically worthless.