DEV Community

What's the best documentation you have ever read?

Madza on January 25, 2020

Consider the documentations of all the languages, frameworks, libraries, editors, extensions, etc you have ever read.

What's the most well written and structured you can re-call?

Personally it would be Vue docs for me.

Collapse
 
bradtaniguchi profile image
Brad

Arch Linux wiki

When you have a distro that comes out of the box with basically nothing but a package manager, you need the wiki.
Need sound, read the wiki, need a UI, read the wiki. Ran into an error, read the wiki.

Few docs are written by those who have sloshed through pain and misery building your own Linux distro from the bottom up.

Hell, the wiki is a great resource for basically any Linux distro.

Collapse
 
vimturtle profile image
vimturtle

Hell, the wiki is a great resource for basically any Linux distro.

I think the Gentoo Wiki also qualifies to be in that list.

Collapse
 
bdwakefield profile image
Benjamin D Wakefield

I haven't spent time with either in years; but Gentoo has to be better right? It was super solid.

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza • Edited

Tbh I've always wanted to try Arch. It's challenging enough :)

Collapse
 
ghost profile image
Ghost

take those appreciations with a grain of salt, is not that hard, you just need to follow the instructions. You'll hear similar comments on how hard Gentoo is, and the same thing, you just need to follow the instructions step by step. Years ago they where difficult but just because you would probably hit some HW compatibility problem while compiling your kernel or the dreaded Xorg config that didn't fitted your HW. But nowadays those problems are very, VERY rare. I haven't got a kernel panic after a kernel compilation in ages and now xorg configure itself.

Of course Arch and Gentoo users will say is very hard, because if not they lose nerd cred I guess. Of course if you are very new and you don't know what the kernel is, what is a init system is, a notion of partitions and bootloaders, you may need more reading but is not much more you need to know and everything else (including those are explained in the install instructions), I installed Gentoo many years ago after 2 months of using Linux, it was painful, but I enjoyed and learned a lot, very fast. :)

Thread Thread
 
madza profile image
Madza

I see your point.. What's your dist of choice now, btw?

Thread Thread
 
ghost profile image
Ghost

Gentoo, after many years and a lot of distrohop, I ended with my 2nd distro (my fist was Mandrake).

I used Arch for a few years, I still have it in some of my ARM boards, is great, their community I didn't like, but AUR is awesome and the wiki exceptional. But at some point the Gentoo call was too strong, so here I'm.

Collapse
 
bradtaniguchi profile image
Brad

I tried it one time from the ground up on a raspberry pi. Great learning experience, but I wont ever do it again. I'm in the business of writing code, not fighting my operating system haha.

Today I use Manjaro, which builds ontop of Arch, but comes out of the box ready to use. Very stable, rolling releases, and Arches packages. Easy to get going, and easy to keep going. It is considered to be one of the best distros for development due to all the packages available, and straight forwardness of Manjaro, which keeps your from doing most of the manual stuff a straight Arch installation requires.

Collapse
 
yuzviko profile image
Oleg Yuzvik

I really like React and Redux docs. They put a lot of thought to make it concise and to the point.

Collapse
 
Sloan, the sloth mascot
Comment deleted
Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

Studying docs and coding besides is the way to go, when it comes to learning!

Collapse
 
msamgan profile image
Mohammed Samgan Khan

laravel documentation so far the best documentation i have read...

Collapse
 
cemkaanguru profile image
cem kaan kosali

My second best

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

I was about to say, that Laravel is very close second, lol xdd
Not to mention the amazing Laracasts series they have :)

Collapse
 
maureento8888 profile image
Maureen T'O • Edited

I've liked Vue (amazing), React (very good explanations and great tutorial app), Nuxt (amazing), Bulma (but layout was bit confusing), Django (very detailed and not overly intimidating with technical lingo + perfect tutorial of getting started with Django). I've found programming language docs WORST to read. Rather learn from formal course with languages.

Collapse
 
kimsean profile image
thedevkim

Vue docs. thats why developers here prefer Vue,

vuejs.org/v2/guide/

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

I knew I wasn't the only one, hahah xdd

Collapse
 
kimsean profile image
thedevkim

I started on Vue, and now I am using React.

if only react had a better documentation. People could tell it was not that hard, just my opinion haha

Collapse
 
chrisrhymes profile image
C.S. Rhymes

I like it when owners let other developers contribute to documentation too. Sometimes when you write docs for your own project it’s easy to miss out important bits as it’s obvious to you, because you wrote the code.

Collapse
 
dploeger profile image
Dennis Ploeger

I'd go for the Godot docs. They have a technical writer as a lead there and it really shows.

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

Yup, writing tech docs is an art and often an underrated skill.

Collapse
 
dploeger profile image
Dennis Ploeger

Absolutely. Especially when you're writing for an unknown, diverse and international audience.

Collapse
 
practicingdev profile image
Practicing Developer

As you mentioned, Vue is pretty great. And many libraries from others in the Vue community are well documented as well, which makes the overall experience even better.

I am also consistently impressed by the documentation quality at Stripe, whenever I need to do anything with their API.

Collapse
 
ampersanda profile image
Ampersanda

Flutter Official Documentation is for me, the best documentation I've ever read. It even gives you tutorial of getting started from another platform before you do "fluttering".

Collapse
 
carolstran profile image
Carolyn Stransky

Roughly related, but I recently asked folks on Twitter what are some projects with great introductory docs. Lots of variety, but some common answers included Vue (as you mentioned), Rust, jQuery and ReasonML 🙌

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza • Edited

Good to see Rust in there, as it's on a list due to WA and Deno.

Collapse
 
tunaxor profile image
Angel Daniel Munoz Gonzalez

I'd say my honorable mentions in no particular order are
Vue docs
Sails docs
Typeorm

But the best one I've read is

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/

Specifically the UWP api reference, the rest of the reference and non reference docs are good there are some really bad but overall the docs are really good

Collapse
 
ghost profile image
Ghost

I second that, also is a documentation that has been polished for centuries and in spite of how long it is, is easy enough to navigate.

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

Since 1996, I guess :)

Collapse
 
fjones profile image
FJones

I'll put in a tentative vote for A Tour of Go. Tentative because the rest of the Golang documentation is cluttered and minimalist at best, but having the Tour as an overview does wonders - and it could work very nicely if expanded into a larger documentation.

Collapse
 
petrsvihlik profile image
Petr Švihlík

I love the new MS docs. They explain the history, general patterns and how they translate to (ASP).NET, and what are the best practices, e.g.:

Collapse
 
gvsakhil profile image
G.V.S Akhil

Mongoose the ORM for mongodb has best docs

Even if we google some doubt it shows mongoose docs in first search rather than stackoverflow

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza • Edited

First thing, when we Google it, is this:

Alt text of image

Collapse
 
gvsakhil profile image
G.V.S Akhil

Hah google a doubt related to mongoose orm 😂😂

Thread Thread
 
madza profile image
Madza • Edited

Sry, I just couldn't resist:

Alt img text

Thread Thread
 
gvsakhil profile image
G.V.S Akhil

Haha

Collapse
 
hamzaanis profile image
Hamza Anis

I would go for Golang documentation for this.

Collapse
 
scrabill profile image
Shannon Crabill

I haven't gotten too deep into it, but I like the Gatsby.js documentation. From what I remember, there were quick start instructions and a more in depth versions. I do not see choose-your-own documentation often.

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

Haven't really took that much of a deep dive in React docs, but to get a grasp of main picture this practical example was very well documented, indeed.

Collapse
 
wahidibrahimy profile image
Wahid Ibrahimy

javascript.info was the best documentation I have ever read

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

I remember visiting that site quite a while ago. Wow, it have been improved a lot!
This goes straight to bookmarks, thanks for sharing.

Collapse
 
xanderyzwich profile image
Corey McCarty

Django was great and easy to get up and running with the tutorial on their site.

Collapse
 
cazaimi profile image
Anmol Shukla

Postman offers really good API documentation generator right out of the box. All you have to do is add your API requests, give them descriptions and you're done!

You can also customise appearance and have them served on your custom domain!

Check them out here:

learning.getpostman.com/docs/postm...
youtube.com/watch?v=Ayo_KdLLcTA

Collapse
 
sickpuppysoftware profile image
Matt King

Visual Basic v3 Documentation
It was broad, easy to read with lots of code snippets.
It also came as a proper paper set of books including a separate book with a guide to all functions in alphabetical order.

I'd never read something before or since that made development so straightforward.

Collapse
 
cemkaanguru profile image
cem kaan kosali

Vue for sure

Collapse
 
em_elkan profile image
E Elkan

I really like the Postman documentation.

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

The tool itself is great, too :)

Collapse
 
ecolipsy profile image
Ecolipsy

I guess the best documentation I have read is the Python docs.

Collapse
 
burlahitesh profile image
Hitesh Burla

Easily React Docs!!
at least in what I've gone through so far...

Collapse
 
samelawrence profile image
Sam E. Lawrence

So far I've been very happy with the Cypress documentation.

docs.cypress.io/guides/overview/wh...

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

First time I hear of that, tbh :)

Collapse
 
endtest_io profile image
endtest

Our very own:
endtest.io/guides/docs

Collapse
 
brianvia profile image
Brian Via

Stripe!!!
stripe.com/docs