Ask HN: What is the best example of api documentation you know? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the best example of api documentation you know?

12 pointssootn11 comments

I am researching documentation for api's. What makes a good documentation? What sections and articles are interesting for new and old users etc? Do you have any favorite documentation and why? Thanks

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Twilio, Stripe, Parse, Sendgrid, Mailgun are examples of companies with good documentation.

Generally, I like to see a high-level overview of the API, authentication scheme, endpoints, sample request and response, error code explanations, and sample code coverage in multiple languages. I wrote a blog post on this topic:

http://murtza.org/creating-a-great-developer-experience/

Much obliged for that. We still have a lot of work still here at Twilio to do around our documentation - appreciate the vote of confidence. Some of the stuff the DevX team is working on right now has me really excited.

Hope you'll share what you think when we release it.

I'd add BlockScore to that list:

https://manage.blockscore.com/docs/index

I like stripe-s documentation for their REST API

https://stripe.com/docs/api

curl examples are the thing that impress me the most ...

Take a look at beautiful docs[0]

[0] https://github.com/PharkMillups/beautiful-docs

New York Times Article Search API: http://developer.nytimes.com/docs/read/article_search_api_v2

everything a dev might ever want to know about constructing a query, calling this API, and parsing the results--beautifully accessible from this homepage

Examples examples examples. From the most common use cases to the less common. With annotations and links to the endpoint reference.

I don't have a favorite company with good documentation, but these two tools have been useful and seem well designed for creating docs: - http://daux.io - http://raneto.com

I second the vote for Twilio, adding NPR to the list http://dev.npr.org/#story-lists-api

Examples, examples, examples.

I also love the Google Maps API. They're certainly in my top 5 for API documentation.

Oo this is great everyone! I really like that sexy Stribe documentation. Thank you

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