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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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What are some examples of great documentation?

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

Latest comments (40)

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ianhopkinson_ profile image
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/

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Dylan DPC

Laravel docs: laravel.com/docs/5.5/

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Andrea Bogazzi

I' m mantainer of a small project ( small like one ) and i find super hard keeping documentation ok. Infact i m not managing at all.

I m trying to document it at best, but is not easy, dedicating time is not enough, you have also to know how to write nice docs and introductions.

the projects is fabricjs.com

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nick profile image
Nick

Well, it's cool that people are sharing popular documentations. It's mostly a result of a lot of contributions from a lot of people or a dedicated team.

What about documentations of a small team about a small to medium sized project? Nobody? I gotta say I'm disappointed.

Well, I'm shamelessly going to share one of mines because I believe you don't come up with documentations almost as perfect as the ones shared here, you build upon them.

My project documentations are definitely not the best out here, we already have enough great recommendations here to satisfy this post so I thought it would be okay to be different at this point.

I believe you have to start somewhere and I recommend, for a small to medium project, to take example of the documentation of my project called Libft as an example:

github.com/r4meau/libft

It's hosted on Github as README file and extended in a Wiki. I'm open to any critic :)

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Andree Kröger • Edited

I will give only positive examples:
Material Design
Google Guice
Mockito

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rodrigo rodríguez

The new release of akka docs

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Trent Harvey

Apple has done an amazing job at thorough documentation of their iOS platform and all the related libraries and concepts. I easily rank them and PHP's official documentation as some of the best examples of how to document a platform/system.

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Samir Bouaked

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

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Andrea Pavoni

Maybe the best examples I've seen are Go and Elixir.

In Elixir, you cam write the main documentation for a module, for each public function and... write examples that can be run as real tests! They are, indeed, called "doctest" elixir-lang.org/getting-started/mi...

Golang has an excellent documentation system: it lets you edit/run the code in examples.

I've mentioned documentation systems rather than specific projects docs. Well, sometimes is the doc system that incentivizes writing docs. That's why Elixir, Golang and many other technologies usually have good documentation.

My 2cents

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nonso profile image
Nonso Chukwuogor
  • Laravel Documentation
  • Material Design