Pick a JavaScript library. Odds are its documentation is going to be frustratingly inadequate. Some (e.g., Ramda) are quite nice. Many are crap.
Moment.js is good, I understood everything with basic JS knowledge and coming from python
Ask HN: What are the most popular libraries with the crappiest documentation?
51–56 of 56 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the most popular libraries with the crappiest documentation?
#52Solr, and SolrJ in particular. Personally I find googling for 3rd party examples / tutorials / stackoverflow posts much more productive than reading the Solr documentation.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most popular libraries with the crappiest documentation?
#53All the AWS stuff.
The CloudFormation docs seemed to have been intentionally designed to torture anyone trying to use it. You end up reading everything you can find, learning almost nothing and having to infer everything from whatever examples you can find combined with just straight up guessing. Guessing with a run/teardown feedback loop measured in minutes with very little feedback.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most popular libraries with the crappiest documentation?
#54The contents of this comment might be very outdated, but still... I remember working with the Dojo and Dijit JS libraries around 8 years ago. They were really great, high quality code, very well structured and designed... Except the documentation wasn't always clear, the examples online were for the older versions of the libraries (not fully compatible), and — my favorite and biggest pain — even the examples on Dijit…
Oh man, what a blast from the past. I remember those docs, they seemed so promising at first glance. But everything was just subtly slightly wrong.
Those libraries were fantastic, so far ahead of the rest of the pack at the time in terms of API design and code quality. I remember looking at it and being so happy to see that there was a js utility/cross-browser library written by engineers thinking in terms of software rather than "scripts".
Re: Ask HN: What are the most popular libraries with the crappiest documentation?
#55On the flip side, does anyone you examples of projects with perfect documentation?
SQLAlchemy docs are very good. I remember having to drop two layers of abstraction under the main API to get some very specific stuff done and it was still documented with useful example code.
The actual software design is great as well, single-handedly changed my mind about ORMs.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most popular libraries with the crappiest documentation?
#56boost