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Comment by emerongi | Hacker News Reader

The key with documentation is knowing where to look. If you are Googling for documentation every time you need something, I think you're doing it wrong. I always go straight to the source documentation and often I go to the source code itself if the documentation is ambigous. JS is probably the only language where I don't know a "true source", so I just go to MDN.

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I'm not sure this is helpful. I know exactly where to look. I still end up having to break my train of thought and the mental model that I'm in by opening the browser and navigating to the precise location where I know the information I need is. Then I need to refocus on the task I was doing before. Multiply this by hundreds of times throughout the day and it seems to me like a huge productivity loss. I used to be against rote learning of any kind, but nowadays I'm not sure. There's too much meaningless minutia that we need to learn or use while programming.

I mean, if you know what to type, you're very likely to get exactly what you need in the first few results, helpfully highlighted in purple to let you know you've been there before.

I also use MDN as my primary source for js documentation. However, the answer is often easy available by just prodding a bit in the devtools console. Live coding keeps the flow :)

I find Google to be a useful index of documentation. I'll often search something like `java documentation <name of class>`.

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