Ifyou write API documentation and need to learn some examples, here, I gather some great ones.

GitHub API Documentation

GitHub developer helps you build your app on GitHub’s platform. Not sure where to start? They’ve put together some handy guides and reference documentation you can use to start building.

Github’s docs are minimalistic, the team isn’t trying to put too much information on one page. They provide a simple menu at the top-right with links to reference material, guides, and libraries, and then it’s down to well-ordered articles. Moreover, to make documentation more vivid, they add some jokes.

They also have a version selector to provide you with the relevant information.

Stripe API Reference

Stripe is a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. Businesses use this software to accept payments and manage their businesses online.

The Stripe team did their best — documentation features a sleek and great two-panel design, with explanations written in plain English on the left and handy code snippets on the right. So, you can read a code and explanation without scrolling constantly that makes reading effective.

Moreover, all the information you need to get started, presented cleanly and sensibly.

Dropbox API Documentation

Most “productivity tools” get in your way. They constantly ping, distract, and disrupt your team’s flow, so you spend your days switching between apps and tracking down feedback. It’s busywork, not the meaningful stuff. Dropbox helps people be organized, stay focused, and get in sync with their teams.

The specificity of this API documentation is that you can choose a necessary language and get relevant information. The Dropbox documentation is great thanks for its simplicity- they don’t bombard you with the wall of information, you can get just what you want.

Twitter API Documentation

We all know what twitter is, and they also have API documentation. I want to point out that it’s great. Twitter API Documentation is more like an interactive guide — it contains information on how many minutes’ read the page is, overview sections, different methods, FAQs, and the like. This makes documentation clear and easy to use.

Twilio Docs

Twilio powers the future of business communications. It has democratized communications channels like voice, text, chat, video, and email by virtualizing the world’s communications infrastructure through APIs that are simple enough for any developer to use, yet robust enough to power the world’s most demanding applications.

The Twilio Docs use the same, two-panel style as the Stripe API Reference. However, Twilio’s API documentation feels a little easier to read since they use well-chosen fonts and bright, contrasting links. Code is highlighted on the other panel with a dark background, so it’s easier to distinguish text and code. It makes topics more obvious.

Ann Green, Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — best online documentation tool for SaaS vendors