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Rachel
Rachel

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Favorite Examples of Clear, Understandable Documentation?

What guidance exists for writing technical documentation?

What are some of your favorite examples for easy to understand documentation when tackling a new framework, language, or library?

Top comments (14)

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radiomorillo profile image
Stephanie Morillo

Hi Rachel!

I compiled a list of technical writing resources; you'll find books, courses, and links to documentation style guides from GitLab, DigitalOcean, Google, and Microsoft. Hope this helps!

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supermario_ai profile image
SuperMario

Dope! Thanks for upping that to GH! 💯❤✌

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hugoliconv profile image
Hugo

Thanks!

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agtoever profile image
agtoever

I really like the documentation of the Python library scikit-learn. It’s structure provides an accessible section for newcomers with introductions, tutorials ad examples. But also the class-by-class documentation contains lots of details, usefull cross references, etc.

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madza profile image
Madza

Check out Laravel and Vue docs :)

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nomade55 profile image
Lucas G. Terracino

Laravel design is always of such a good taste.

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Mark Erikson • Edited

I've been working on rewriting the Redux core docs, and collected some notes and resource links on good docs writing practices.

I particularly liked the article What Nobody Tells You About Documentation.

On that note, I just published a brand new "Redux Essentials" tutorial that was written using the lessons I'd learned from those resources.

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Tyler V. (he/him)

The Vue Docs are SO GOOD 💚

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michelemauro

Spring Boot and Spring Framework documentation sites are terse, easy to read, as detailed as they can be and well styled. All the corpus says "professionally organized" and "well-thought". That's not easy, given all the functionality that both products cover.

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Bobby Iliev

The best documentation that I've seen is the DigitalOcean API documentation.

For a small opensource project I believe that Laravel Voyager has some great docs as well.

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Dave Parr • Edited

The tidyverse documentation is phenomenal.

In R we have a few conventions for documentation, which includes both short form (per function) documentation, but also long form (vignettes). Because we also have R markdown these are both driven by the language itself.

In addition we also have packagedown, which turns docs into websites, though I'm sure this exists in python in a similar form as well.

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Matt Ellen

I haven't read it in a long time (for reasons) but back in the early 2000s the PHP documentation was amazing.

Each function had a clear explanation with clear examples plus user contributions for edge cases.

I haven't found easier to understand documentation since.

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mellen profile image
Matt Ellen

Actually, if I can broaden the definition of documentation, Gatherer, the Magic: the Gathering card index, is pretty great.

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supermario_ai profile image
SuperMario • Edited

I can tell you that whoever writes NordVPN's copy for their release/patch notes deserves a raise:

nordvpn.com/blog/nordvpn-windows-r...

IMO, a perfect blend of technical and plain talk.

+1 for the Vue specialization!

💯❤✌