Developer tools to read documentation offline

One of the most important parts of learning or using a programming language, framework or library for your projects is reading the official documentation. They provide what you need to get to know what they have to offer in detail, with examples, tutorials, tips, style guidelines, good practices, API reference and other bits information that tell you how to do the things you want to do.

Docs are scattered around the web and sometimes we would hope for them to be together in one place that we can access offline, and enable searching for the topic that we’re looking for. Even the best programmers tend to forget syntax and ways to use a technology; there is NO shame in taking a look at the documentation if you need a refresher. After all, that’s what it’s for, isn’t it?

Dash for Mac

This app developed by Kapeli, offers you plenty of features including snippets, reference for over 200 APIs and languages, 100+ cheatsheets, the ability to create your own docsets, and fuzzy search. It also has editor and IDE plugins to find documentation right in the comfort of your editor of choice. The app costs €15 EUR a year (subscription) and you can obtain it here.

Zeal for Windows, Mac, and Linux

The main difference between Zeal, Dash and the last tool is that Zeal downloads the Documentation sets from the official sites, formatted as they come, as if they were scrapped directly from the original sites so, you won’t find uniformity and some docsets might take longer to download than others.

To download the dcos taht interest you, go to Tools -> Docsets, from here, check the ones you want to download and let the process begin (it may take a long time depending on how many and the amount of images they have). The good thing is that it’s free!

Devdocs.io - Web app

If you’re not interested in installing software, you can check out Devdocs, they have plenty of APIs and languages and also an offline mode but you need to install the docsets first; a process that doesn’t take long compared to Zeal because it’s pure text most of the time.

Make sure you thank the FreeCodeCamp team for making it public.

Velocity for Windows

This is the direct alternative for Dash but only runs on Windows. It claims that the docsets are “Provided by Dash for OS X”. The price is $19.95 USD for a personal license.