What are some examples of great documentation?

I'd love to see some projects that do documentation very well for inspiration!

Comments

[Ian]

Maybe not quite on topic but I think the Physically Based Rendering book which combined code and documentation in the literate programming style is excellent:
pbrt.org/

[Daniel J. Summers]

Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) has helped me immensely; they document JavaScript (in particular) at a level where it's a good reference. It's complete, yet it doesn't assume an overly high level of knowledge.

[Mubashar Iqbal]

Always been a big fan of the Stripe Docs:
stripe.com/docs

Also the Laravel docs are pretty awesome, the search is really good too:
laravel.com/docs

[Wajdi Al-Hawari]

Came here to post about Stripe. Totally agree. +1

[Kyle Stephens]

Came here to post Stripe. .

Very accessible, clear, concise and with strong examples in many languages.

stripe.com/docs/api

[Elijah Schow]

Positive Examples:

• Material Design
• Mail Chimp's Pattern Library
• Google something + "Digital Ocean". e.g. "Deploy NodeJS DigitalOcean". You'll probably get a pretty good guide.

Negative Examples:

• MongoDB - ...where do I even start? Literally. Where?
• Mongoose - they eventually make sense, but only once you're already are familiar with how mongoose works...
• Bootstrap v3 - This is contentious, but even after years of using Bootstrap, I always have difficulty finding stuff in the docs. I can never remember what's in the "CSS" vs "Components" vs "JavaScript" tabs and the navigation sidebar is painful to use

Edit: Bootstrap v4's documentation fixes most of the problems in v3's.

[Jesse Ditson]

I'd second stripe in that their docs pretty pleasurable to look at, although I would say they can be a bit lacking when it comes to documenting references (lots of "see account update docs for full object", which at times isn't totally accurate).

Golang probably has the best documentation I've ever seen - it's not much to look at, but you can go from never writing a line of go to understanding it at a pretty deep level without ever leaving the site. There are both interactive docs and a a book on best practices directly on the site.

I was recently really impressed by the AirTable API docs, which take stripe's "docs on the left, code on the right" paradigm to a new level by contextualizing the docs to an existing project (step one is to select your project, step two is browse the docs with all your table names and stuff filled in). As such, "writing" code that interfaces with the API is primarily copy pasta, which is pretty productive. Not sure if it would scale to a more abstract API but this approach is fantastic for tables.

[Hans Christian Rudolph]

Django's docs are great to work with, concise and available in many different languages.

[Nicholas Duffy]

Django's docs are the absolute best.

[Samir Bouaked]

Always been a big fan of the Algolia documentation : algolia.com/doc/

[Zach Berger]

I'm a big fan of Parse's documentation. There is a good balance between narrative and working code examples. Additionally, the navigation is superb; you are never more than two clicks from any other section of the documentation for the entire platform.

[Jay.]

OpenBSD man pages. PostgreSQL documentation. Illumos source code.

[Er Galvão Abbott]

+1 for PostgreSQL docs.

[Berkus Decker]

So many comments and nobody mentioned Qt?

Qt docs are rather detailed and very helpful.

Negative examples: MSDN (with the "DWORD dwFlags -- a dword containing flags" style of descriptions) and Boost - where each library has it's own unique style of documentation and usually lacks badly on EXPLAINING the usage of the library in the right way.

[Andrea Bogazzi]

i wish i could filter them from my google searches. and do not forget the terrible automatic translations