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Madza
Madza

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What's the best documentation you have ever read?

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.

Top comments (55)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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madza profile image
Madza • Edited

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

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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. :)

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madza profile image
Madza

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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julienp profile image
Julien

Seconded, the React docs are not only very good at making sure you understand how to use the API, but they clearly explain the concepts.

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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.

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madza profile image
Madza

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

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msamgan profile image
Mohammed Samgan Khan

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

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cemkaanguru profile image
cem kaan kosali

My second best

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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 :)

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julienp profile image
Julien

While it was a bit daunting to start, I found the PostgreSQL very well written and educational. Now I don't hesitate to refer back to it whenever I have a little doubt about something or need to refresh a topic.

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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.

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madza profile image
Madza

Since 1996, I guess :)

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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.

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kimsean profile image
thedevkim

Vue docs. thats why developers here prefer Vue,

vuejs.org/v2/guide/

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madza profile image
Madza

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

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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

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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

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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 🙌

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madza profile image
Madza • Edited

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

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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.

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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.

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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".

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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.

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madza profile image
Madza

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

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dploeger profile image
Dennis Ploeger

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

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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.:

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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.

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Hamza Anis

I would go for Golang documentation for this.