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matheusfelipeog/beautiful-docs

★ 9,484Audience · writerComplexity · 1/5Setup · easy

TLDR

A community-curated list of software documentation examples worth learning from, covers databases, frameworks, APIs, and tools, with notes on what makes each one stand out.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((beautiful-docs))
    What it does
      Curated doc examples
      Writing inspiration
      Tool discovery
    Categories
      Database docs
      Framework guides
      API references
      Language guides
    Resources
      Writing articles
      Doc-gen tools
    Audience
      Technical writers
      Open source devs
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Code map

Detail Auto

An interactive map of this repo's files and how they connect — its source is parsed live in your browser. Click Visualize to build it.

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Find inspiration for your project's README by reading examples of highly regarded developer documentation.

USE CASE 2

Discover documentation generation tools by browsing the tools section of the curated list.

USE CASE 3

Share the list with your team to set a shared standard for what good developer documentation looks like.

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min

In plain English

Beautiful Docs is a curated list of documentation and developer resources that contributors find particularly well-written, well-designed, or otherwise worth learning from. The project started as a personal collection by one developer who believes that good documentation is what separates a successful open-source project from one that goes unnoticed, and it has grown through community contributions over time. The list covers a wide range of software and programming languages: database tools like Redis, web frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails, payment APIs like Stripe, programming language guides, open-source project READMEs, and much more. Each entry comes with a short note from the contributor explaining what makes that particular documentation stand out, whether it is the clarity of writing, the visual design, the navigation, or the quality of examples. Alongside the main list of examples, the repository also has sections dedicated to writing about documentation (articles and essays on the craft of writing good docs) and tools that help generate documentation from code or structured text files. This makes it a resource both for people seeking inspiration and for those looking for practical tools. The project accepts pull requests, and the guidelines are simple: include a brief note on why you are adding a link and some attribution to yourself. Entries are kept in the order they were added. There is no code in this repository, it is purely a curated collection maintained as a README file. Anyone who writes documentation for software projects, technical writers, or developers who want to improve the quality of their own project docs would find this list a useful starting point.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Based on the examples in beautiful-docs, write a README structure template for a Python command-line tool.
Prompt 2
What patterns make Stripe or Redis documentation stand out? Help me apply those principles to my own API docs.
Prompt 3
Using the documentation examples from beautiful-docs as a guide, review my project README and suggest concrete improvements.
Prompt 4
I want to write docs as good as the ones in beautiful-docs, give me a step-by-step checklist for a new open-source library.
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