Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

Python? I find the documentation to be confusing and difficult to search. Many of the arguments to standard functions are not explicitly documented nor do they have obvious enough names for me to guess what they mean. As I was learning Python over the past few years, I inevitably turned to blog posts and Stack Overflow for clearer examples and more explicit descriptions of optional parameters.

I'd be curious to know what you like about the Python documentation because my experience has probably been different than yours.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

#6

Post by hprotagonist » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 2:29 AM UTC

The requests package for python is nicely documented: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/

Re: Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

#7

Post by pacuna » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 2:48 AM UTC

AWS CLI APIs in general are very clean and intuitive to follow through their help menus.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

#8

Post by anoncoward111 » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 3:01 AM UTC

Side note, how do I volunteer or work part time writing technical documentation?

I feel like my writing skills and my ability to make code understandable and explicit to other readers would be a perfecy use for producing great documentation.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

#9

Post by pythonslayer » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 3:08 AM UTC

tiagoma wrote: post #2

Qt docs, python docs, cppreference, code synthesis odb

Agree about Qt docs. I wish they provided the equivalent for Qt for Python.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best API documentation you have ever seen?

#10

Post by dccoolgai » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 3:08 AM UTC

Lodash.js every single piece is explained with complete lucidity, and even if it weren't the examples are concise and illustrative.