What do you consider the gold standard for software documentation?

The reference docs for Java Standard Edition APIs and MSDN Win32 APIs were clear, comprehensive, and unambiguous. The behaviors of those platforms were also predictable and deterministic. At a time when the internet was a luxury and there weren't Google and SO, I was able to learn and use Win32 APIs just from their reference docs and guides.

In sharp contrast to Java's docs are Android's terrible docs. As a Java programmer, I had assumed Android's docs and behavior would be of equally high quality. But time and again, Android's platform had a a way of springing surprises that weren't documented anywhere. More than a decade has passed but the activity lifecycle's behavior and docs remain as ambiguous today in 2022 as they were in 2010!

Vim's online documentation (in the original meaning of "online") is second to none in the text editor/IDE space.

- A quick and easy interactive tutorial to teach you the absolute basics: $ vimtutor. No prerequisite whatsoever.

- An extensive tutorial that takes you from noob to wherever you want to go in a gentle and iterative way, the user manual: :help usr_toc. This one is pretty much the natural next step after vimtutor if you ever want to use Vim efficiently. Too many people think they are smart enough so they skip it. They are wrong. Even vimtutor is not a prerequisite.

- A heavily cross-linked reference that covers literally everything, the reference manual: :help reference_toc. This one can be anything from extremely detailed to very terse. You get there when you are not sure about something are to take a deep dive on a specific subject. In general, this part of the documentation makes more sense if you went through the user manual first.

I agree, Postgresql has been my gold standard for more than a decade. The documentation is an excellent user manual and reference guide. This is a rare combination. Most databases I've worked with provide deeply technical references that are only good for someone already experienced with the product. With most software vendors you are lucky to get some always out of date tutorial blogs to accompany their api docs.

The Postgresql documentation is good enough to teach someone SQL from scratch.

Havent read/seen a lot but from a noob's perspective, node.js docs were an easy read. Git manual online is also easy to navigate but i suppose the simplicity of the tool itself helps.

I’m a big fan of the Mozilla MDN web docs; alas am not fluent with postgresql