I am researching documentation for api's. What makes a good documentation? What sections and articles are interesting for new and old users etc? Do you have any favorite documentation and why?
Thanks
Twilio, Stripe, Parse, Sendgrid, Mailgun are examples of companies with good documentation.
Generally, I like to see a high-level overview of the API, authentication scheme, endpoints, sample request and response, error code explanations, and sample code coverage in multiple languages. I wrote a blog post on this topic:
Much obliged for that. We still have a lot of work still here at Twilio to do around our documentation - appreciate the vote of confidence. Some of the stuff the DevX team is working on right now has me really excited.
Hope you'll share what you think when we release it.
everything a dev might ever want to know about constructing a query, calling this API, and parsing the results--beautifully accessible from this homepage
I don't have a favorite company with good documentation, but these two tools have been useful and seem well designed for creating docs:
- http://daux.io
- http://raneto.com
Generally, I like to see a high-level overview of the API, authentication scheme, endpoints, sample request and response, error code explanations, and sample code coverage in multiple languages. I wrote a blog post on this topic:
http://murtza.org/creating-a-great-developer-experience/