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Comment by 0xcde4c3db | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how mainstream of an opinion this is, but I'd suggest skipping Google's own tutorials. It would be reasonable to suppose that a multi-billion-dollar corporation that massively benefits from a thriving developer community would put out first-rate documentation, but I was quite disappointed by how much of an inconsistent and incomplete mess those tutorials are.

While I've only briefly skimmed it myself, I've heard a lot of good things about The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development. Newer editions require a $20 "subscription", but older ones are available for free [1].

[1] https://commonsware.com/Android/4-2-free

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To be honest, Apple’s own tutorials aren’t really that much better, and are also often outdated.

Raywenderlich.com is always my first pick.

Looks really good. Thanks for the recommendation. Will definitely check it out later.

I have a pet theory that mobile development is deliberately intractable as a kind of gatekeeping tactic. There's certainly no excuse for it to be as inaccessible as it is, with the resources available. There is an aggressive rejection of the mobile phone as a user-oriented computing platform - instead you must be a "developer", and to prove that you are a "developer" you must devote an enormous amount of disk space to "developer tools" and tolerate byzantine project structures and weird languages, which require byzantine IDEs to manage. The provision for writing software actually on these devices with an order of magnitude more power than a Cray-2 is actively suppressed. God forbid I be able to write a friggin Python script on my phone...

This isn't necessarily conscious conspiracy on the part of the perpetrators. But it's a systemic attitude that ultimately has the same effect, and the incentives point in that direction. Remember, Google/Apple only make money on their respective app stores when you buy an app - free apps are worthless to them, as are apps you write yourself; free software apps that let you escape the ecosystem are worse than worthless!

Interestingly, the docs for Flutter are comprehensive and overall just really excellent.

Maybe they shifted focus to that in the past years.

Is there any example where a library/framework's creator has the best getting started documentation for learning how to use it?

I'm lazy and not very academic, and I feel like I always end up following a Medium or Hackernoon tutorial and using the official API docs for supplemental reference. I feel like this has been my experience for Flutter, React, ReactNative, Docker. I'm actually curious what folks' favorite 1st party docs are.

it's an outdated opinion probably, but K&R 'The C Programming Language' is a gem.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language

I needed to use only official docs for Laravel and before that CodeIgniter.

Also I really like React’s documentation. Previously, I had used random tutorials to get started but recently I went through their official docs to fill in gaps in my knowledge. Now I wish I had started with official docs in the first place.

I've been reading those Android docs. It's not great but better than nothing.

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