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Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

#31
post #21

Side note, how do I volunteer or work part time writing technical documentation? I feel like my writing skills and my ability to make code understandable and explicit to other readers would be a perfecy use for producing great documentation.

I need some docs, would compensate, contact in my profile

Happy to take a look and possibly help with the documentation you need :)

Re: Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

#32
post #5
post #2

Qt docs, python docs, cppreference, code synthesis odb

Python? I find the documentation to be confusing and difficult to search. Many of the arguments to standard functions are not explicitly documented nor do they have obvious enough names for me to guess what they mean. As I was learning Python over the past few years, I inevitably turned to blog posts and Stack Overflow for clearer examples and more explicit descriptions of optional parameters. I'd be curious to know…

I feel similarly about Python. I never really had to interact with it beyond using it as a calculator on the command line until a project I was a part of earlier in the year had a utility Python script introduced and I needed to hack on it to make desired changes. Then, more recently, I started using BeautifulSoup[0] for personal scraping. Of course it feels more trivial now (and now I wish I documented my frustrations so I could be more specific and perhaps help out other Python learners in the future), but it does take a while to adjust to Pythonic code where everyone is using cultural conventions like _foo and __foo and you wonder what the hell __foo__ is[1].

More on-topic, searching is a major weakness of Python's docs. What's that? Python just got multi-line strings allowing embedded expressions? They're called f-strings? Let me go read about them[2]. I can't link it, but even using Startpage the immediate results are a post from RealPython and PEP498 and while both are great, they aren't terse enough to be frequently referenced. If you search for "formatted string literal"[3] in the docs it takes 10 results before you reach something explicitly talking about them. And then you need to follow the links a couple times to reach https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#f-... (notice it is anchored as "f-strings" which was the first term we searched for).

While the Python docs, when I've found them, have been adequate for me so far -- although I still check up on how others do the things I want to do -- I'm partial to docs such as MDN that cover parameters and return value in one take for reference with more in-depth information as you scroll down, if needed[4].

[0]: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

[1]: Here's a start for reading. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8689964/why-do-some-func...

[2]: https://docs.python.org/3/search.html?q=f-string

[3]: https://docs.python.org/3/search.html?q=formatted+string+lit...

[4]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Re: Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

#34

Side note, how do I volunteer or work part time writing technical documentation? I feel like my writing skills and my ability to make code understandable and explicit to other readers would be a perfecy use for producing great documentation.

Happy to pay! Email me at david@tryretool.com please. :)

(Your profile email isn’t public!)

Re: Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

#35
post #30

Auth0's is pretty damn good. Clear docs, inline sample code...Auth0 even inlines your credentials into the example code if you're logged in. [1] Auth0 - https://auth0.com/docs/api/authentication

I thought the same about those until I tried to follow the examples. First in ruby and then in Vue, neither worked without a lot of hacking/changes. Really cool idea though to put the credentials in the examples.

That's too bad. Had good success with their Node and React examples.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

#36
post #4

Stripe API docs. There have probably been many past threads about this.

Stripe started really really well with its developer, library and documentation support. In fact I think that’s a very large part of their initial success.

At some point they lost that focus and dropped the ball. For example for a very long time they had no direct support for reactjs even when it was hugely popular, instead you had to go find some third party library which is a terrible thing to have to do for implementation of payment code.

Maybe they’re improved and started supporting actively the technologies developers are using.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

#40

Stripe is probably the best but I think Twilio is a close second. For both the page designs are easy to read, there are clear examples (some are even interactive), and the sites are easy to navigate.

Twilio's API and SDK references vary from practically non-existent to completely unusable. I often have to resort to reading their SDK code to figure out what methods to use.
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