/beautiful-docs

Pointers to useful, well-written, and otherwise beautiful documentation.

Beautiful Docs

I love documentation. If you work with/are writing code intended for usage and consumption by more than one person, you should love it, too. Documentation and other resources will make or break the success of your project. And the more open and collaborative you want development to be, the more crucial docs become.

With that in mind, here's a list of docs and other developer resources that myself and others find particularly useful, well-written, and otherwise "beautiful." May they serve to inspire you when writing and designing yours. Thanks to various contributors, we now also have sections dedicated to Writing about Documentation and Tools for Generating Docs.

This should be updated fairly regularly. As usual, pull requests are encouraged. If you're contributing a link, be sure to include a few words on why you're adding it and some sort of self-attribution so that people can know from whom it came.

Mark

And Now For The Docs (in no particular order)

Writing about Docs (again, in no particular order)

Generating Docs

  • docco - Pretty docs from source code comments with ports for many languages. (contributed by @kylewest)
  • DocumentUp - Instantly beautify your Github repositories' README.md. (contributed by @kylewest)
  • Sphinx - Comprehensive documentation tool using restructuredText with beautiful HTML and PDF output. (contributed by @nikhilcutshort)
  • Read the Docs - Hosted docs using Sphinx, supports translations and finding docs for specific software versions. Used the Django Docs (contributed by Stephen Paulger)
  • dr.js - Tiny JavaScript documentation generator from the author of RaphaëlJS. (contributed by @nikhilcutshort)
  • Markdoc - Lightweight documentation/wiki generator in Python, released in the public domain. (contributed by Neelfyn)
  • ApiGen - Creates clean API documentation from PHP source code (contributed by bryceadams)
  • docgenerator - Organize your documentation in Markdown files. (contributed by Florian Margaine)
  • dexy - Extensible documentation/report generator supporting multiple programming languages and serveral input and output formats. (contributed by troytop)
  • Slate - Static API documentation creation tool from the team at Tripit.
  • MireDot - REST API documentation generator for Java. Plugs into your build process and generates a searchable html page. (contributed by bertvh)
  • codo - CoffeeScript API documentation generator, similar to YARD. (contributed by Logan Koester)
  • Flatdoc - Create well designed open source documentation from Github repository README files or simple Markdown files. (contributed by @moore)
  • GitBook - Utility for generating documentation, books and exercises using GitHub/Git and Markdown. (contributed by Samy Pessé)
  • Daux - A documentation generator that uses a simple folder structure and Markdown files to create custom documentation on the fly. It helps you create great looking documentation in a developer friendly way. (contributed by veshinak)
  • comment.js Simple API documentation generator. (contributed by @dciccale)
  • phpDocumentor - phpDocumentor enables you to generate documentation from your PHP source code. (contributed by shivamdixit)