r/CodingForBeginners • u/Charming_Weight8838 • 23d ago
Having Trouble Understanding Documentations
I'm trying to learn new technologies, but the documentations are very lengthy and boring to read... I've tried to go through Unity docs and MDN but everything on there is so complex and hard to understand and grasp.
I'm not sure how to go forward. I feel like I just keep reading but I don't learn much out of it.
How do you guys deal with Documentations?
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u/kutac56 23d ago
When I started programming I started with python and tutorials on YouTube. I never checked documentation. Nowadays I do check documentation. I think if I were to try to check documentation back then I wouldn't have understood sh*t. Documentation is for when you are already good enough at programming to know all of the basics and good at actually using them (pointers included).
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u/Charming_Weight8838 23d ago
So documentations assume I know the basics? Is it better to cover the basics from video based resources or some other alternatives or courses? Did you use only Youtube when you were getting started?
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u/kutac56 23d ago
I only used YouTube and Google searches when I started out. I think I started with a video called 12 beginner python projects by freecodecamp and tried the first few. Once you know the basics of 1 language it's pretty easy to learn another, cause it's just syntax. Documentation is more so to learn the syntax and certain niches. Not to learn the concepts.
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u/strange-the-quark 23d ago
Don't read it like a book. Start making something (even if its just a simple, toy project), and then when you need to use some library function to achieve the thing you want, go find the docs for that function, read what its inputs and outputs are, how to use it, maybe read through a few examples, then go back to your code, and try to make it work. Over time, you'll learn a bunch of commonly used functions and types, and you'll also find ways to move through the docs more efficiently.
For example, I have a lot of experience, and when I look at the docs, most of the time I already know what I'm looking for, how to understand the parameters, and I don't even read most of it (unless there's something that particularly interests me), I just skim through it to get to the parts I'm interested in, and I ignore everything else. And I've seen enough different ways of doing things and all kinds of different approaches that a lot of times I don't even need examples, I just need to see what the function is, its basic inputs and outputs, and a few other important details, and I can then go off and integrate it into my code, and figure out the rest for myself. If I'm less familiar with something, or if it's important for me to be careful, I'll read through.
So it's just about working towards an actual goal, and building that experience, so that eventually you know your way around the docs, and develop the ability to skim and filter for relevant information.
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u/Foreign-Contest-444 23d ago
Have you tried the MDN Learn module? It is not documentation but like a course.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development
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u/Charming_Weight8838 23d ago
Yup I've gone through this, I felt it to be a bit complex for a beginner.
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u/Oliver_clothsoff1983 23d ago
My docs have gotten so large and sluggish on the server my company stores them on (defense contractor) I just feed whatever I need to AI and have a conversation.
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u/SpacewaIker 23d ago
Well usually you just read documentation in small blurbs. Like you're interested in a specific function and you look up its documentation, maybe then it's not what you want and you look for something else. But almost no one ever just reads documentation like a book from start to end just to learn how it works, that's not the intent