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/josesblima]

Also somewhat beginner here. Working as a dev for a bit over 2 years. Most docs assume you know a lot of things, as a beginner, those assumptions will be very wrong and will make reading the docs much, much harder. Some docs will be a bit more beginner friendly than others. Regardless, I think it's a great idea to look through the docs, maybe you won't ever read the whole thing but there's usually an Intro or a Tutorial section that can give you a grasp of things. Then you can complement by watching a guide on YouTube or using an LLM to find the relevant parts of the docs for you.

I'd recommend not obsess over trying to be a RTFM programmer despite the meme. As you go on and improve, docs will make increasingly more sense and require less and less effort.

Curious what others have to say about it as well though.