API documentation

API documentation is a term used in computer programming. It describes the Application programming interface of a programming project, so that other programmers can continue developing in the project, or develop other software that make use of the projects API, without having to study the code itself.

API documentation is commonly published in electronic document formats such as HTML, PostScript or Rich Text Format. Many Integrated Development Environments also have API Documentation as part of their help system.

There are several tools designed to automatically generate API documentation from source code. These typically make use of some special type of code Comments to generate the documentation.

= See also =

*List of documentation generators *Comparison of documentation generators