What makes you go “wow” at documentation?<p>I’m looking for some inspiration on technical product documentation in the DevTools space (think cloud platforms, CI/CD, etc.)
Personally I think MDN is one of the best examples of a really good docs site:
<a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/</a>
Not DevTools but Matlab's product documentation is superb. I've learned a lot of signal processing, image processing, communications theory, statistics, and more just from the docs and examples (code, LiveScripts, and Simulink models). Very well written and easy to access from command line, editor, and/or the web.
I would have to say that the best technical documentation I've ever come across has to be the Commodore User Manuals for VIC-20 and Commodore 64. Coupled with <i>Compute!'s Gazette</i> I was able to launch a career in BASIC programming. The user manuals completely documented the entire architecture of the KERNAL and BASIC system, as much as any programmer could need to do all sorts of things. Kudos to Commodore on documentation, definitely a lost art, and never found in Windows-based apps again.
<a href="https://docs.airship.com/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.airship.com/</a><p>Airship, formerly Urban Airship, i think.<p>a few years ago i was helped to build out a Sphinx-based search feature, integrate it into a Pyramid-based app, and something UA were doing made me want my app/docs to look/act like theirs<p>part of it was the search, part of it was the comprehensiveness, part of it was the magically-appearing in-page #anchor links when you'd mouseover an <H>-type header element so that you could easily refer to a section of a page -- something which i feel like is obviously crucial to useable docs, but rarely exists in real life, and part aeshetics.<p>a quick glance just now seems they still have docs, tho i guess most established company doc sites would look good and generally be high-functioning these days. i suspect more of them were built from scratch back in the day, but not sure -- it's prob difficult for the docs vendors to keep up with integrating api tools, etc.
I bought a Fluke 8840A bench multimeter recently. Its manual has comprehensive electrical schematics of the internals! Not only that, a significant portion of the manual is taken up by explaining exactly how each portion of the circuit works. Mine didn't come with the AC option, but if I wanted to I could build one without having to reverse engineer the schematic. As someone who didn't grow up in that era (was born in the late nineties) that's pretty wild to me.
The elixir docs. Much is generated from the code itself (the language "requires" it, so up to date), with very nice interlinking to functions etc.<p><a href="https://elixir-lang.org/docs.html" rel="nofollow">https://elixir-lang.org/docs.html</a>
I might be stretching the terminology here as far as "technical product documentation" but Arch Wiki has been an absolute blast for me as a source of not only specific distro knowledge but general Linux information. Very concise a yet somehow also very comprehensive.
Hardware Design with RP2040 [0].<p>An official guide on integrating the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller into one’s own circuit design. Essentially a series of worked examples that touch on pretty much every hardware feature of the chip, with a good amount of advice transferable to other microcontrollers. Provides steps and justifications. The RP2040 datasheet is equally fantastic: straightforward wording, minimum abuse of passive voice commonly seen in microcontroller literature, and accompanying C/asm examples.<p>[0]: <a href="https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/hardware-design-with-rp2040.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/hardware-design-wi...</a>
Visual Studio App Center has excellent documentation: <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/distribution/codepush" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/distribution/cod...</a>. It's comprehensive and well structured.<p>If you're looking for a system that looks as good, mkdocs (<a href="https://www.mkdocs.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mkdocs.org/</a>) with the mkdocs-material theme (<a href="https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/" rel="nofollow">https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/</a>) can get you quite close!
DEC's documentation for VAX/VMS and related apps. The great orange/gray wall of heavy-duty binders. What wowed me: whatever I needed to know, it was in there, I could find it, and the software behaved as the documentation said.
I like semi-automatically generated docs like AWS API docs that contains in minimum the type information for every field there is, and often much more.<p>I don't like Python docs where it ends up on long winded explanation for specific cases but does not cover all arguments, or only mention some in passing.
Microsoft SCCM uses SQLserver under the hood and the developers created a lot of database views to access information. The documentation about how to construct queries using those views was excellent, including good use of color coding.<p>Nicely done approach to de-complexifying a fairly complex schema.
I am unlikely to use a product if I cannot figure out how to use it intuitively. I prefer products that are easy to learn and use, without the need for extensive documentation.
<a href="https://docs.posit.co/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.posit.co/</a>, it just makes sense the way everything is organized.
Prisma's docs[0] are one of the best I've read<p>[0] <a href="https://www.prisma.io/docs" rel="nofollow">https://www.prisma.io/docs</a>
Hot take: Apple’s. The parts of their SDKs that are documented follow the same pattern of giving a broad overview of what a type is and what it can do, and then the declarations are grouped by topic so that you can jump straight to the part that you need instead of scrolling through the whole thing just to find only the one thing that you intend to use.