Easily second best would be the DEC TOPS-10 Software Notebook Series which in my experience was a …

I agree with you, but let's be honest, if you aren't already well exposed to that world then those docs are going to scare the shit out of you. They definitely are not "easy reads". The extent to which you are looking for something reference like and intensely technical vs. something to ease you into a new stack will determine whether you appreciate IBMs mainframe docs. They definitely don't fit the mold of what most people expect from documentation nowadays though. If anybody wants to see what they look like, type IBM zOS v2r5 indexed collection into Google (the most recent batch of docs). I don't really have any one in particular that I would recommend starting with, because none of it is going to make much sense if you are new to that world. The ABCs of Systems Programming Redbooks are probably a better introduction than the main documentation, although those volumes are a little bit …

I agree with this. The Postgresql docs are adequate--not outstanding, just adequate--by the standards of the mainframe and minicomputer manuals of those days. Nothing else today even comes close[1]. There are so many things you just have to try. 1. OpenBSD makes a good attempt, but the project is under-resourced.

> which in my experience was a set of 20 binders They came in binders because, regularly, you’d receive a packet of new pages, sometimes a few, sometimes tens or even hundreds, with instructions on where to insert them in the binders and what pages to discard. git pull is a tiny bit easier ;-)