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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 combin

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 With most software vendors you are lucky to get some always out of date tutorial blogs to accompany their api docs.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.

fargle 4y ago
I don't know if it's "gold standard" but I have the same feeling about the GNU CPP (c preprocessor) and GNU Make manuals. There are very few good sources about either using make or CPP macros. These manuals are more than just how to use gmake or the CPP stage of gcc. They actually are great references into how make works and how to write macros in C. I find myself referring to both frequently, so at some level, they must be considered far above the average. https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-12.1.0/cpp/ https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-12.1.0/cpp/ In the 1980s, maybe earlier, many computer software packages included manuals of this ilk. I remember a couple of examples, "DBASE-IV" and "Mark Williams Let's C" compiler, "Commodore BASIC". They not only documented the specific tool, but also the entire theory of databases, "C" programming, or BASIC and the coding useful things on the PET/C64. It's amazing how good the quality of the technical writing was as well as how broad the subject matter was. It was literally everything you needed to know to solve your problems - not just how to use their tool. I think it had to be when computers and these applications were so new to so many.

fargle 4y ago

I don't know if it's "gold standard" but I have the same feeling about the GNU CPP (c preprocessor) and GNU Make manuals. There are very few good sources about either using make or CPP macros. These manuals are more than just how to use gmake or the CPP stage of gcc. They actually are great references into how make works and how to write macros in C. I find myself referring to both frequently, so at some level, they must be considered far above the average. https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-12.1.0/cpp/ https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-12.1.0/cpp/ In the 1980s, maybe earlier, many computer software packages included manuals of this ilk. I remember a couple of examples, "DBASE-IV" and "Mark Williams Let's C" compiler, "Commodore BASIC". They not only documented the specific tool, but also the entire theory of databases, "C" programming, or BASIC and the coding useful things on the PET/C64. It's amazing how good the quality of the technical writing was as well as how broad the subject matter was. It was literally everything you needed to know to solve your problems - not just how to use their tool. I think it had to be when computers and these applications were so new to so many.