You may find it surprising, but Vim.
Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?
#32Hardware Design with RP2040 [0].
An official guide on integrating the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller into one’s own circuit design. Essentially a series of worked examples that touch on pretty much every hardware feature of the chip, with a good amount of advice transferable to other microcontrollers. Provides steps and justifications. The RP2040 datasheet is equally fantastic: straightforward wording, minimum abuse of passive voice commonly seen in microcontroller literature, and accompanying C/asm examples.
[0]: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/hardware-design-wi...
Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?
#33Microsoft SCCM uses SQLserver under the hood and the developers created a lot of database views to access information. The documentation about how to construct queries using those views was excellent, including good use of color coding.
Nicely done approach to de-complexifying a fairly complex schema.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?
#34I 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 i…
In that domain, also, the Swanson speed square. Comes with a 'blue book' full of all kinds of tips and tricks and measurements.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?
#35Ironport manual
Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?
#36DEC's documentation for VAX/VMS and related apps. The great orange/gray wall of heavy-duty binders. What wowed me: whatever I needed to know, it was in there, I could find it, and the software behaved as the documentation said.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?
#37The FastAPI docs are fantastic: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/
I'd rather have more concrete documentation of the API, the current version is structure more like a long tutorial.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?
#38Visual 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!
I’ve always found the msdn documentation to be excellent. Although sometimes finding stuff can be overwhelming.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?
#39DEC's documentation for VAX/VMS and related apps. The great orange/gray wall of heavy-duty binders. What wowed me: whatever I needed to know, it was in there, I could find it, and the software behaved as the documentation said.
Although I have not read DEC's (Digital Equipment Corporation) documentation, but I've come across a 1990 book that mentions DEC's approach to documentation:
> Digital Equipment Corporation noted in their 1983 internal documentation guidelines that user documentation should be written first — not last as is traditionally done — because the user documentation is an excellent way to debug the design of a system or a program. “If a writer finds it difficult to document a system, the problem is probably the system not the writer. Holes in design, obscure constructions, and apparent contradictions become starkly visible in the documentation.”
(From book: Writing better computer user documentation, 1990)
Re: Ask HN: What is the best product documentation you’ve ever seen?
#40Surprised to see Postgres documentation not being mentioned. It is one of the most comprehensive and intuitive documentation I have ever seen