Ask HN: What's the best documentation site you've come across? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the best documentation site you've come across?

31 pointssawirricardo35 comments

I think back then devs seems to praise Stripe's docs site. Is it still relevant right now?

Documentation for Wolfram Language:

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).

I haven't done serious frontend web dev for a while, but MDN was consistently excellent a few years back.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript

Agree. MDN is gem for new learners to learn about frontend and backend development!

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.

Compare https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.str-contains.php to the tiny one paragram you get at https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.find (which then redirects most users to a far more confusing explanation about the in operator https://docs.python.org/3/reference/expressions.html#members...

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.

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.

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".

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta

Postgres’s - https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/index.html

+10

I appreciate the HAProxy docs. They're stored as text files in the main code repository, though there are HTML representations.

There are three main files:

Starter Guide: https://docs.haproxy.org/3.0/intro.html

Configuration Manual: https://docs.haproxy.org/3.0/configuration.html

Management Guide: https://docs.haproxy.org/3.0/management.html

Having all the similar docs together in the same file (all config options, for example) is refreshingly simple.

Every time "documentation" is mentioned, it would help to specify which quadrant this is about: https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/

I see answers here that are oriented towards completely different parts.

For me it's the Django docs.

Stripe is still the gold standard for me. But I'm interested to see what this thread digs up.

My only gripe with the Stripe docs is that it can be slow to load / render. But the content and presentation is very good.

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.

[1] https://help.hcl-software.com/dom_designer/14.0.0/index.html

[2] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/

Emacs. Normally i read it locally but the web version is just as comprehensive.

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.

PHP Docs are pretty good as already mentioned.

I personally love the Documentation for Kirby CMS:

https://getkirby.com/docs/guide

https://getkirby.com/docs/reference

https://getkirby.com/docs/cookbook

For a product: Delphi 2. I don't think I ever saw a better offline documentation which is so self-contained

For a project: MDN, they refactored the Web's JS documentation

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.

Vim - https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_toc.html

Stripe

Django

Hubspot

Mercurial with comments https://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/a-tour-of-mercurial-the-bas...

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.

See https://hexdocs.pm/ - search for anything and click on the links.

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:

https://university.webflow.com/videos

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.

I was quite pleasantly surprised by the quality of AWS docs, especially coming from Azure. A part from that, as mentioned already: Django.

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.

Lots of great sites with docs for software. I'm curious if people have suggestions for infrastructure-related docs as well.

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.

I'd add Terraform documentation to the list

The examples right up top are great and give my example-first learning style a chance to really see what’s going on before diving in too deep.

Spacy documentation webpages are top notch!

BuildBuddy

https://www.buildbuddy.io/docs/introduction/

I don't think I ever had a case that wasn't covered in the docs.

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