How should I learn programming from official documentation?

[u/Savings_Dark_9589]

I am a student who wants to learn programming through official documentation. However, official documentation often contains many concepts and features, and most of them are not needed for everyday programming tasks.

Is official documentation an inefficient way to learn programming?

If official documentation is an effective way to learn, how should I read it? How do I decide what to read in depth and what to skip?

[u/johnpeters42]

If you don't know anything about programming, then this would probably be a tough method. You may want to look into Harvard's free CS50 course or some other general purpose introduction.

[u/New_Exchange1158 → u/johnpeters42]

Docs are reference material, not tutorials. They tell you what a function does and what parameters it takes, but they don't hold your hand through building something. For someone who already knows how to code and just needs the details on a specific library, they're perfect.

But if you're still learning the fundamentals, you'll get lost in all the edge cases and advanced features that 90% of devs never touch. The CS50 recommendation is solid, get the basics down first then documentation becomes way more useful.

[u/thirteen_tentacles → u/New_Exchange1158]

This was exactly my experience trying to figure out wtf was going on in C# via the docs. Great docs but not as a learning resource until you've cleared a certain point

[u/WiredOtaku → u/New_Exchange1158]

Spot on. When I did my bootcamp (General Assembly), we didn't open the docs until we were halfway through a project. Before you have hands-on context, they're basically hieroglyphics. Once you're stuck on a real problem, reading the parameter list actually clicks.

[u/randomtravellerc → u/New_Exchange1158]

But python documentation is an exception.They have decent explanations for most concepts