Ask HN: What Makes API Documentation Great?

3 pointsbrandonlipman3 comments

What specifically makes documentation great? Example: something about the design, format, where it's located, structure, video tutorials/no tutorials. Examples would be really helpful. Also, if you are a developer, do you tend to spend time reading documention before going forth and testing it out or not? Thanks!

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This list contains lots of good examples https://github.com/PharkMillups/beautiful-docs

For our service (http://geocoder.opencagedata.com/) we can't use many API-docs-autogeneration tools because their typical usecase is dozens to 100s of methods (think: Stripe). We only have one endpoint and a couple of aliases.

This is awesome. Thank you!

Like you said, examples would be [are] really useful!

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