Ask HN: What is your favorite documentation website?

10 points by davewasmer 13 years ago | 6 comments

What are some examples of the best documentation you have used, especially on the web? Based on both the content of the documentation, as well as the UI/UX to actually read it.

I'm interested to see what other developers think makes for good documentation.

okaramian 13 years ago |

I'm not a big fan of having a bunch of handholding examples in a blog or something similar. I remember Spotify's setup being pretty decent as far as application related documentation.

https://github.com/spotify/apps-tutorial

If it's something OSS I'm good with a github with the code up, maybe a couple of examples that are well commented and easy to get up and running within the framework, and a reasonable README to guide me through the process.

I'm already experienced with writing software, so if I have something to play with and read through in a text editor I can learn what's going on faster than reading about how to set hello world up for a new framework.

davewasmer 13 years ago | |

What about if it isn't OSS? Do you like more reference style docs (i.e. this method takes arguments x, y, z, returns a string) or narrative (i.e. to accomplish goal x, you'll need to do y and z like this ...)?

okaramian 13 years ago | | |

Honestly, I'd rather have a well commented example application that utilizes the framework with decent API documentation. So a little bit of both. The APIs are hopefully written well enough that things are fairly self documenting.

Maybe a couple of different example applications to serve different goals would be helpful as well instead of one monolithic project.

I've just never really been big on blog posts that are showing me code and why things are there, when that can all be done within the project itself and I can run it, maybe setup breakpoints and hack around. I can get up and running faster that way, and I hate high barriers to entry when I'm looking to play around with something.

davewasmer 13 years ago |

Personally, I find Stripe's documentation to be excellent. It's clear, concise, and a good balance between narrative guides and comprehensive reference material:

https://stripe.com/docs

hayksaakian 13 years ago |

i like rubyonrails.org, a thorough reference of rails basics. I end up using it frequently to correct my syntax for things like rendering partials, etc.

deveshz 13 years ago |

I really like the way Coffeescript is documented. http://coffeescript.org/