how do developers learn from the docs ?
i have been in the web dev field for about 2 + years when i want to learn a technology node js for example i would get a course or read a book every time i try to learn from the docs i would find it almost impossible to implement anything i learned in a real world app or even build one ,the docs doesn't explain how to use that knowledge in a real world app or even give examples on how to do so i wonder how do other devs who make the courses or the books know how to build apps and do stuff just learning from docs ?
5 Replies
node doc sucksm but I think you have to mix between doc and stackoverflow so u can see some use cases
I guess different people have different approaches, but I'd for example never read docs cover to cover. It's just too much information to process at once for most projects which are big enough to have proper documentation. An important aspect of books and courses is how they condense and filter wast amounts of information into smaller quantities that you can actually process.
As for how the people writing books learn, they spend lots of time with the concept they're teaching about. Often they're also involved in developing the tool itself if we're talking about tools on the more niche end.
I'd even argue that the purpose of documentation isn't really to teach you how a thing works. Documentation isn't pedagogic. Documentation is more like a technical specfification, showing the standards for whatever tool you're interacting with
so if your are learning a new technology where do u start and what would you do to learn it ? , / are u saying that the people who make these books ,courses are the oirginal dev of the technology itself , what would u say to the people who claim that docs is for learning ?Yes, people who write books about a subject were often involved somehow in the foundation or evolution of that subject.
And I'm not going to debate hypothetical people. An API documentation is not a pedagogical device. It is a technical specification.
personally (maybe this is just me) i only look at the docs for reference. i never start there. ill start with a project in mind and break it up into pieces until i get down to a fundamental question i dont know how to answer, then i'll just look for the answer to that specific question and go from there.
for instance, right now im working on a simple plugin for OBS, so my first question was: 'how do i run any code at all in obs?' so i google'd around and found their starter template
then my next question was 'how hook into the video feed so that i can run some code when a new video frame happens?' so i google'd that and chatgpt'd it and eventually i found an example of a simple plugin that did that
but i pretty much never start just by reading the docs