· 1 min read

Thoughts on Reading Documentation

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Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

Reading documentation is the best way to learn a particular technology.

Well-written documentation is similar to a book and reading it has a similar effect.

Documentation presents the original developer’s philosophy behind the technology.

The depth of knowledge you gain with documentation can potentially remove hundred of hours of unnecessary Stackoverflow searches.

It’s a difference between knowing something syntactically and knowing the philosophy behind a technology.

Most documentation is about 2-5 hours of reading Max.

I find having a highlighter extension in Chrome to be extremely useful.

Apart from the usual, the appendix sections contain many gems like FAQs and standard references, making things easier.

If you aren’t able to read the complete documentation, glance through the index. If the documentation is good, you’ll find something in the index.

In the long run, it takes less time to read documentation than to go through hours of stack overflow.


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