From the XZ Utils README (included in the xz-utils package): 1.3. Documentation for liblzma The liblzma API headers include short docs about each function and data type as Doxygen tags. These docs should be quite OK as a quick reference. I have planned to write a bunch of very well documented example programs, which (due to comments) should work as a tutorial to various features of liblzma. No such example programs have been written yet. For now, if you have never used liblzma, libbzip2, or zlib, I recommend learning *basics* of zlib API. Once you know that, it should be easier to learn liblzma. http://zlib.net/manual.html http://zlib.net/zlib_how.html