OpenCV.
The tutorials get you off the ground and the Docs are detailed enough to take you safely over the long grass.
Ask HN: What is example of good documentation in your opinion?
41–50 of 71 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is example of good documentation in your opinion?
#42Many open source project documentations are good. Kubernetes, Python are two I constantly refer to. I haven't been terribly disappointed.
Re: Ask HN: What is example of good documentation in your opinion?
#43Rust was already mentioned, but I want to call out the compiler error messages specifically. That's putting documentation where you need it exactly when you need it most and it's a triumph.
Re: Ask HN: What is example of good documentation in your opinion?
#44The manual for my dishwasher. What I learned from it was that technical writing is a skill and that it does not come from technical knowledge alone.
The best documentation knows its audience and what they want to know. I quite like cppreference and usually ISA documentation is quite good. But this is because I am part of their target audience.
The worst documentation is the one which has entirely lost sight of its audience. Particularly offenses are it being a mix of tutorial and reference, which is filled with explanatory prosa potentially even serving as a first introduction to the given topic.
Cppreference is about the worst way to learn C or C++ and if it weren't it would be far less useful to me. Documentation writers have to know their audience first and foremost. There is a place for walkthroughs and tutorials, but they can not replace an actual language reference.
Re: Ask HN: What is example of good documentation in your opinion?
#45Numpy, scipy are quite good and complete
Re: Ask HN: What is example of good documentation in your opinion?
#46A counter example: any official Java docs are pretty sparse and unhelpful. Jenkins docs too.
The other commenter mentions docs from the past being better, but I have always found Java’s docs to be particularly atrocious.
No examples, and barely any information beyond a type signature.
When I open up a project’s docs and they have that same Java html formatting, I get that faraway stare…
Re: Ask HN: What is example of good documentation in your opinion?
#47Mentioned by others but the Stripe docs are not only quite good but also very nicely designed esp their API pages
Re: Ask HN: What is example of good documentation in your opinion?
#48I like the Divio framework for thinking about how to structure docs https://documentation.divio.com/introduction/
Re: Ask HN: What is example of good documentation in your opinion?
#49Two long-form examples for programs I don't see here yet. Note that they won't necessarily be great for other projects (e.g. for a library, where you as the user will probably need/expect "on-point documentation" for specific details while working with the product in question), but as a wholistic introduction to a specific tool, I've yet to see much better examples.
Re: Ask HN: What is example of good documentation in your opinion?
#50In my humble opinion, this library I made has great documentation: http://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/
Most importantly it has interactive examples that let you understand through doing and playing, rather than just reading.