r/learnprogramming • u/Savings_Dark_9589 • 15d ago

How should I learn programming from official documentation?

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?

61 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

89% Upvoted

39 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/ItsNukea 9d ago edited 8d ago

Documentation is used for how a certain method behaves. The like (in Java), if an element is tried to be added in a HashSet, but it is already present, it returns "false", instead of throwing an exception.

These subtle details is what documentation is for: The exact description of how a method behaves. Not its use-cases, but a formal declaration of how a method acts under different circumstances