Ask HN: Which software/service has the best documentation you have ever seen?

[sthatipamala]

This can be anything from a good help center to API documentation. I am trying to derive some inspiration and pick up good patterns.

[alptrv]

Python docs. No, really, I've never read any book about python, I started programming in python after reading a few tutorials about a language and then just looked at docs when some question come up. Also, I don't know whether it's just me or not, but I find that python projects tend to have a good documentation.

As for services, I think Parse is a good example of a very well written documentation.

[hcarvalhoalves]

Both Python itself as most big Python projects spend a lot of attention on documentation. Django is a very good example.

[cd34]

  http://www.sqlalchemy.org/
  http://www.makotemplates.org/
  http://docs.pylonsproject.org/en/latest/index.html

[klaut]

for me, Django has the best documentation out there. You can actually learn a lot about django by just reading the documentation. which is not always the case for other projects :)

https://www.djangoproject.com/

[digamber_kamat]

YUI3 documentation. ExtJS Documentation.

[bmelton]

The one that I like that nobody else seems to is the PHP documentation at php.net, especially the documentation circa PHP3. I like it because, despite the language inconsistencies at the time, they allowed curated comments on the language docs so that exceptions were generally spelled out in the language.

They also had usage examples so that it was easy to remember "Was it find(needle, haystack) or find(haystack, needle)?".

jQuery is the same way, though their comments seem less curated, and often have red herrings attached to the documentation that should be removed, but aren't.

Really good documentation exists for Django and Python, but in my opinion, more 'how-to' examples would be great for people just starting out.

That said, since you asked what the best is, for me, the answer is quite easily the documentation for Stripe[1]. In addition to being exemplary in every other way, they also do real-time substitutions for variables.

An example that would look like "get("<YOUR API KEY">") in every other document you've ever seen would actually contain YOUR API key in the Stripe.com docs. Simply brilliant.

Leftronic[2] does the same thing as well, which I thought was a good lesson learned, but overall, their docs aren't quite as brilliant as Stripe's.

[1] - http://stripe.com/docs

[2] - http://leftronic.com/

[dracoli]

xcode's integrated documentations is a time saver!

[ugur]

sencha ext-js