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Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read?

#45

QT wasn't so bad as far as I remember. But as jolmg pointed out, some projects are just simple readme and that is more than enough. Love those. But the total opposite is also common, a wall of text that is meaningless and in the end, you have to go through the source code to get some answers...

Qt had amazing documentation around Qt 4.5. It's still really well-written—especially the old stuff—but their biggest problem is that they're awful at maintaining websites. The expected lifespan of a link to a page in their documentation is about two years.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read?

#46

Vue JS docs are the best. I don't think anything beats it :)

I always feel like the author is my buddy talking to me. Sometime i have a question, then read one. There is it, the answer.

And this applies to the vue API as well. The guy just crafted in so many little things to make real life easiser. The event.once helper for example. Simple, elegant, useful.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read?

#48
post #43

Django, the Python-based web framework, has fantastic docs too: https://docs.djangoproject.com

Pythons standard docs are pretty disappointing in comparison. It takes a lot of reading to encounter what you need.

And don't get me started on the stdlib doc part dedicated on asyncio.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read?

#49
post #13

Any discussion on documentation is incomplete without mentioning Django https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/

Came here to say this. The thing I love about Django’s documentation is the layering. From beginner tutorial through to high level overviews of the subsystems, through to detailed usage for the subsystems, through to API level docs, through to the source code - all of it is there, and all linked together well. On top of that, it’s all well written, approachable, full of notes and caveats/warnings where necessary (for…

The warning and caveat are the best part for me. The django team understands very well the principle of least surprise, which is why old django installs still work, the ecosystem is very well intagrated and updates are not dreaded. It strikes menthat something new like react is in version 16 (and the doc sucks) while django is much older and only reaching v2, with great docs.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read?

#50
MDN because it's exhaustive https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

Jekyll because it's beautiful and the user can read all the pages at once with the previous/next buttons (at the bottom) https://jekyllrb.com/docs/home/

Node.js because they propose a single page version and it makes search easier https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v10.x/docs/api/all.html

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