For developers
The order to read these docs in when you are here to ship something.
The shortest useful route starts with a record you submitted yourself and works outwards from there. Read these in order and stop when you have what you need.
1. Submit something
Quickstart takes you from a new account to an encrypted, signed record submitted from your own code, and back again to read it. Everything below makes more sense once that has run.
2. Understand what you submitted
Envelopes covers what a record actually is, and Non-custodial keys covers which key does what. Read the second one before you design how your service will store an access token, because the two token types the platform issues are not interchangeable.
3. Do the job you came for
Guides is the task lane: submitting a transaction, writing data, storing a file, encrypting and signing, combining outputs, reading a record back. Each guide takes one job and walks it end to end.
4. Look things up
Reference carries the exact surface: the SDK, its output types, the JSON-RPC endpoint for services that are not written in JavaScript, and the envelope formats the SDK writes today.
5. React to what lands
Event listeners fire on a trigger and run an action, so your service can respond to a record the moment it arrives rather than polling for it. If the action you need is a step in a tool you already run, Zapier may get you there without code.
6. Read a whole application
Examples holds applications built on the SDK, worth reading when you want to see how the pieces fit rather than how one call works.
If you get stuck on the concepts
Machines explains the reader, writer and recorder model the SDK uses for state that is rebuilt from its own history. The public audit layer explains why the record is checkable at all. Neither is required to ship, and both answer the questions that come up in review.