Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read (or written)?

#1

Post by kincardine » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 6:07 PM UTC

I've been thinking a lot about documentation and how to get a user up to speed on a code base as quickly and effortlessly (on the part of the user) as possible.

I know "best" can be somewhat arbitrary or subjective, but use whichever metric you think is most relevant (organization, clarity, etc...). And, if you'd like, let me know what you think "best" should mean in relation to documentation quality.

Also, I know this question has been asked before, but those threads are all several years old, so in that time the documentation pool has obviously changed (and hopefully improved).

Re: Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read (or written)?

#2

Post by bitshepherd » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 7:06 PM UTC

https://freebsd.org/handbook

It's a comprehensive, yet not too dense, set of documentation for getting people up to speed on how to do things with FreeBSD. You may not find a better one even today.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read (or written)?

#3

Post by apoorv_arora » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

https://www.digifire.in/2016/02/06/interview-with-apoorv-aro...

It's a recently written tech interview for a startup named Baatna. Good read!

Re: Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read (or written)?

#4

Post by codegeek » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 8:33 PM UTC

I like the official git documentation. There are many tutorials out there but reading through the official doc always makes things clearer to me at least

https://git-scm.com/doc

I also like Stripe documentation

https://stripe.com/docs

Re: Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read (or written)?

#5

Post by drakenot » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 3:02 AM UTC

ZeroMQ Guide has frequently been mentioned on HN as one of the better pieces of software documentation:

http://zguide.zeromq.org/

It is useful not just for using ZeroMQ, but about learning about distributed systems in general.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read (or written)?

#6

Post by zbjornson » Sun, Feb 07, 2016, 3:50 AM UTC

The reference pages for Mathematica are by far the best docs I've seen for a programming language. They're thorough and each example can be evaluated in place.

Online version here [1] is not evaluatable and is rendered to images, but otherwise it's the same content as the desktop version. Specific example [2].

[1] http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ [2] http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Histogram.html