

Ask HN: Which software/service has the best documentation you have ever seen? - sthatipamala

This can be anything from a good help center to API documentation. I am trying to derive some inspiration and pick up good patterns.
======
alptrv
Python docs. No, really, I've never read any book about python, I started
programming in python after reading a few tutorials about a language and then
just looked at docs when some question come up. Also, I don't know whether
it's just me or not, but I find that python projects tend to have a good
documentation.

As for services, I think Parse is a good example of a very well written
documentation.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
Both Python itself as most big Python projects spend a lot of attention on
documentation. Django is a very good example.

------
cd34

      http://www.sqlalchemy.org/
      http://www.makotemplates.org/
      http://docs.pylonsproject.org/en/latest/index.html

------
klaut
for me, Django has the best documentation out there. You can actually learn a
lot about django by just reading the documentation. which is not always the
case for other projects :)

<https://www.djangoproject.com/>

------
digamber_kamat
YUI3 documentation. ExtJS Documentation.

------
bmelton
The one that I like that nobody else seems to is the PHP documentation at
php.net, especially the documentation circa PHP3. I like it because, despite
the language inconsistencies at the time, they allowed curated comments on the
language docs so that exceptions were generally spelled out in the language.

They also had usage examples so that it was easy to remember "Was it
find(needle, haystack) or find(haystack, needle)?".

jQuery is the same way, though their comments seem less curated, and often
have red herrings attached to the documentation that should be removed, but
aren't.

Really good documentation exists for Django and Python, but in my opinion,
more 'how-to' examples would be great for people just starting out.

That said, since you asked what the best is, for me, the answer is quite
easily the documentation for Stripe[1]. In addition to being exemplary in
every other way, they also do real-time substitutions for variables.

An example that would look like "get("<YOUR API KEY">") in every other
document you've ever seen would actually contain YOUR API key in the
Stripe.com docs. Simply brilliant.

Leftronic[2] does the same thing as well, which I thought was a good lesson
learned, but overall, their docs aren't quite as brilliant as Stripe's.

[1] - <http://stripe.com/docs>

[2] - <http://leftronic.com/>

------
dracoli
xcode's integrated documentations is a time saver!

------
ugur
sencha ext-js

