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Shahed Nasser for Medusa

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What's the Best Documentation You've Used?

Documentation is very important for us developers as it guides us to build what we need using a tool or service. When the documentation is great, the developer experience feels seamless. When the documentation is incorrect, missing details, or not clear, we struggle building with the tool.

What was the best documentation you've used? It can be for any framework, service, or tool. Also, what made this documentation so useful to you?

P.S: at Medusa, we're currently in the process of revamping our documentation to provide a better developer experience. If you're interested in contributing to an open-source project, you can always check out current good first issues or report any issues you find in the documentation.

Top comments (19)

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rafo profile image
Rafael Osipov • Edited

Best documentation I've ever used was for IBM Notes (former Lotus Notes) Designer.

Almost every object. every property, every method were described and contained usage examples.

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

Seems like IBM doesn't support it anymore but IBM generally have good documentation!

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rafo profile image
Rafael Osipov

IBM has ruined IBM Notes and sold it to HCL.

Long time ago IBM Notes was a main platform to build groupware solutions. But "genius" IBM managers just ruined this product, it became outdated, companies who used this product for years switched to other products and as a final step, IBM sold this product to HCL.

HCL tries to resurrect it, but I think it could not be done, time is lost.

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Shahed Nasser

From what I can tell it's something similar to Notion right?

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rafo profile image
Rafael Osipov

I have no experience with Notion, checked it now, yes, it looks like HCL Notes (former IBM Notes, and Lotus Notes).

HCL Notes presents mail, calendar, todo, discussions in an integrated environment, also you can build your own application (called databases), that utilize all these capabilities. Multi-platform, web-enabled, mobile, etc etc.

More info:

hcltechsw.com/notes

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino

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rafo profile image
Rafael Osipov

Also, Notion is a SaaS (software as a service) product as I understand. HCL (IBM, Lotus) Notes/Domino can be installed on a company's premises and used in an isolated environment (for extra security purposes, classified document processing, etc etc).

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

Ah makes sense. Well it definitely must have been a loss for the users who were using it!

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair
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Shahed Nasser

Interesting! What do you think makes it a good documentation?

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Ben Sinclair

It walks you through everything from the basics of BASIC to machine code and port mappings for the Z80. As a kid, I learned so much about programming from it.

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Cesar Aguirre

Stripe API docs...

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

No doubt!

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Offline

The Symfony documentation

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Shahed Nasser

I've used the Symfony documentation before and it's definitely detailed and useful

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Jack

Vue is definitely up there in terms of documentation quality...

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Rachit Khurana

Django has the best docs I have ever seen.

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Shahed Nasser

Never tried it but sounds interesting to take a look at! what do you think makes it the best?

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Hijen EL Khalifi

Best documentation i have ever read is Laravel's , straight-forward detailed and has a decent amount of practical examples
I also tried GoLang, their tutorials are super easy to grasp

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Mohammad Arif

IBM Cloud Education

By far the best documentation so far in terms of rich content and usability.