Having written a fair bit of technical documentation, this tweet requesting recommendations for the best open source docs caught my eye:
What’s the best documentation you’ve ever seen for an open source project? (And what makes it so good?)
— Erin Kissane (@kissane) September 26, 2016
Thankfully lots of people were keen to suggest good examples and six hours later I went through the replies. The variety was surprising, from man pages to tutorials to core modules so well written you “don’t really need documentation to understand it”! In the end, there were a few that got several mentions so for the record, here are the open source docs that were recommended at least twice, with one clear winner:
- Django (5 mentions)
- PHP.net (3 mentions)
- jQuery (2 mentions)
- Lodash (2 mentions)
- Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) (2 mentions)
- Perl — unclear if Perl.org or Perldoc (2 mentions)
- Python Requests library (2 mentions)
- Rust (2 mentions)
- WordPress for users and developers (2 mentions)
Photo by Niels Heidenreich: https://www.flickr.com/photos/schoschie/1330790063/
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