# Welcome
**Here are SkyWalking 8 official documentation. You're welcome to join us.**

From here you can learn all about **SkyWalking**’s architecture, how to deploy and use SkyWalking, and develop based on SkyWalking contributions guidelines.

**NOTICE, SkyWalking 8 uses brand new tracing APIs, it is incompatible with all previous releases.**

- [Concepts and Designs](en/concepts-and-designs/README.md). You'll find the the most important core ideas about SkyWalking. You can learn from here if you want to understand what is going on under our cool features and visualization.

- [Setup](en/setup/README.md). Guides for installing SkyWalking in different scenarios. As a platform, it provides several ways of the observability.

- [UI Introduction](en/ui/README.md). Introduce the UI usage and features. 

- [Contributing Guides](en/guides/README.md). Guides are for PMC member, committer or new contributor. Here, you can find how to start contributing.

- [Protocols](en/protocols/README.md). Protocols show the communication ways between agents/probes and backend. Anyone interested in uplink telemetry data should definitely read this.

- [FAQs](en/FAQ/README.md). A manifest of already known setup problems, secondary developments experiments. When you are facing a problem, check here first.


In addition, you might find these links interesting:

- The latest and old releases are all available at [Apache SkyWalking release page](http://skywalking.apache.org/downloads/). The change logs are [here](../CHANGES.md).

- [SkyWalking WIKI](https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SKYWALKING/Home) hosts the context of some changes and events.

- You can find the speaking schedules at Conf, online videos and articles about SkyWalking in [Community resource catalog](https://github.com/OpenSkywalking/Community).

We're always looking for help improving our documentation and codes, so please don’t hesitate to [file an issue](https://github.com/apache/skywalking/issues/new) 
if you see any problem. 
Or better yet, submit your own contributions through pull request to help make them better.