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Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

Slight OT: can anyone recommend websites that have good technical documentation?

What I mean by “good”, is the design & layout of the technical documentation is easy to consume and visually appealing.

(I’m revamping my customer facing tech reference docs and wanting have a visually appealing doc but not so much visually appeal it becomes distracting)

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I think Mathematica’s documentation is beyond excellent. Here is the documentation for the Flatten function:

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Flatten.html

Just look at the amount of examples and details for this function. It is like that for every function.

I haven't used mathematica but look forward to learning it one day as an indulgence. I code mostly in R, and it's renowned for having some hurdles to jump through in order to get a package published on its primary repository (CRAN), but what that high standard means is you can download almost any library and expect to find extremely well documented functions with examples that can be run with minimal (usually zero) additional data/dependencies. It's a real treat, and I miss it massively when using languages with less rigorous and less uniform approaches to documentation.

+1 for Mathematica’s documentation system. It is the best of any software doc, OSS/free or closed/commercial. By far.

The Gitbook layout seems a workable baseline --- the free level is moderately customizable --- I use it for:

https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d

The paid option includes an export to PDF which is okay for a quick print or free PDF to put on a tablet, but would need a lot of work to make a book.

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