
Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read (or written)? - kincardine
I&#x27;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.<p>I know &quot;best&quot; can be somewhat arbitrary or subjective, but use whichever metric you think is most relevant (organization, clarity, etc...). And, if you&#x27;d like, let me know what you think &quot;best&quot; should mean in relation to documentation quality.<p>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).
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bitshepherd
[https://freebsd.org/handbook](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.

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zbjornson
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/](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/)
[2]
[http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Histogram.html](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Histogram.html)

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codegeek
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](https://git-scm.com/doc)

I also like Stripe documentation

[https://stripe.com/docs](https://stripe.com/docs)

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

[http://zguide.zeromq.org/](http://zguide.zeromq.org/)

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

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apoorv_arora
[https://www.digifire.in/2016/02/06/interview-with-apoorv-
aro...](https://www.digifire.in/2016/02/06/interview-with-apoorv-arora-co-
founder-at-baatna/)

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

