It's detailed, complete, shows many examples for commom use cases, 'neat' examples showing what's possible, and lists down possible issues. I do see certain documentation quality issues sometimes.
The documentation itself is done using the features of Wolfram Language, so the examples can be run inline (depending on the platform).
PHP docs are an underrated gem. They get several things right:
1. Individual pages for each function.
2. Clear examples for common usecases.
3. Explicit documentation for input and return types.
4. The quick search is amazing - it prioritizes library reference over other pages.
5. Clean and useful references to related methods.
The user submitted notes were a big positive a decade ago - they highlighted common gotchas, workarounds, and surprising alternatives, but have gotten dated over time (kinda like SO answers). But the voting mechanism attempts to keep them in check.
When they first came out, pre stack overflow, having comments at the bottom with people’s example snippets, tips, and tricks was INSANE! It was so helpful. Shout out early PHP users who helped me so much.
The PHP docs pretty much ruined me for any other libraries documentation. Java docs had some nice things - ALL the methods and properties were shown for an object, even if it was inherited. I love Python, but their library documetation is a bit of a mixed bag.
Arch (a Linux distribution) has excellent documentation that can be reused in other distros. Not the "how to install part" but rather the "how to configure" one.
I usually prefer to read their docs rather than the ones in man pages which are "flat" (all the initiation had the same importance)
I love the Arch Wiki, when switching between distros I often end up looking at the Pacman/Rosetta [0], which "display the correspondence of package management commands".
The online documentation for Lotus (later IBM, later HCL) Notes/Domino is excellent. It's not purely a "site" because the documentation is a Notes database itself, but it is also available on the public Internet [1], so I think it counts.
For open source projects, Django [2] is pretty close to the gold standard.
I second that. One of my favourite things to do when I’m bored is to flip through the INFO manuals and see what functionality of Emacs (or some of the often equally-well documented packages) I haven’t explored yet. It is so pleasent to navigate them from within Emacs once you get used to the info mode keybindings.
In general, I like how it is easy to access any kind of information about Emacs (keybindings, commands, variable values, active modes, text/face styles, etc.) from anywhere within Emacs through the C-h shortcuts or via “Help” in the menubar. Contrast that with what is usually offered as “Help” in most other applications and how hard it is to find just some basic piece of information.
All of raspberry pi’s SDK documentation and data sheets for the pico (rp2040) are amazing. Perfect material to build an embedded engineering course around.
Generally speaking, Elixir. Documentation is written in the language itself, it is easy to create, and is very well written. As the authors themselves are the first users of the documentation facilities, they are very well done and maintained.
This in turn means that the structure and style is shared by many libs in the ecosystem, and everything is natively cross-referenced.
Documentation facilities in Elixir are extremely powerful, as you can use Elixir to generate the documentation itself! See e.g. the way UML diagrams are embedded here: https://hexdocs.pm/say_cheez_ex/readme.html#uml-dot-graphs - nothing stops you from creating them dynamically based on external information, test results, external services or whatnot.
As a general rule (for established libraries at least), the docs for rust crates stored on https://docs.rs are pretty good. This comes from having docs being built-in to the tooling, so it's really easy to deliver docs in a consistent format.
This is a bit of an unusual choice, but I recently was trying to use Webflow, and its videos are both highly informative and funny! Engineers often thumb their noses at videos, but they really show how to do it well:
I've seen a few sites train LLMs / use RAG on their online docs. When I used it, it was very useful in terms of search and synthesis. imo it'd be nice if projects release a current model trained on their documentation and code.
Hah, I guess everything is relative. I’ve never encountered any positive sentiment about the tangled web of AWS docs, nor do I think they’re fit for purpose.
i think aws has the most comprehensive infra related docs here -> https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ with good architecture diagrams. i understand that this is just for aws related products and how they are used, i would love to learn if there is a more general site where infra related topics are explained and discussed in more detail.
https://reference.wolfram.com/language/
It's detailed, complete, shows many examples for commom use cases, 'neat' examples showing what's possible, and lists down possible issues. I do see certain documentation quality issues sometimes.
The documentation itself is done using the features of Wolfram Language, so the examples can be run inline (depending on the platform).