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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?

#21

Post by prxtl »

Visual Studio App Center has excellent documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/distribution/cod.... It's comprehensive and well structured.

If you're looking for a system that looks as good, mkdocs (https://www.mkdocs.org/) with the mkdocs-material theme (https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/) can get you quite close!

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

#22

Post by satiric »

I bought a Fluke 8840A bench multimeter recently. Its manual has comprehensive electrical schematics of the internals! Not only that, a significant portion of the manual is taken up by explaining exactly how each portion of the circuit works. Mine didn't come with the AC option, but if I wanted to I could build one without having to reverse engineer the schematic. As someone who didn't grow up in that era (was born in the late nineties) that's pretty wild to me.

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

#24

Post by thiht »

foreigner wrote: post #10

Stripe

Is it really that good? Every time I want to document my own APIs I give a look at Stripe’s docs because everyone praise them, but I always end up unimpressed. Their docs don’t feel that good to me, not very readable or particularly clear.

Am I missing something?

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

#28

Post by justinclift »

martin-adams wrote: post #25
foreigner wrote: post #10

Stripe

Having implemented subscriptions and using the docs, it was ambitious, confusing and hard to know what parts were applicable or not. What I needed from the docs was a good tutorial.

Yeah, same here. I've been finding them confusing, with seemingly conflicting information.

Asking for assistance and giving feedback just gets completely ignored now, whereas when we first created our account the support staff were very keen + helpful.

Not sure what's changed, but it's not good now. :(

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

#29

Post by justinclift »

eitally wrote: post #8

SQLlite, no question.

Hmmm, not really. There's a bunch of stuff there, but sometimes it's missing needed info.

Wish I could think of an example off the top of my head though, but nothing is springing to mind.

Was doing stuff with (the official) SQLite extensions a few weeks ago, and the docs didn't really cover some of the things I was after at the time. Not the end of the world, just a bit frustrating.

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

#30

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

Hot take: Apple’s. The parts of their SDKs that are documented follow the same pattern of giving a broad overview of what a type is and what it can do, and then the declarations are grouped by topic so that you can jump straight to the part that you need instead of scrolling through the whole thing just to find only the one thing that you intend to use.
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