It def started mine. The biggest for me was the excellent documentation and comments as you said. The comments were like an early version of stackoverflow
This was before the embarrassment of riches that we have now...
- before proliferation of open source examples on GitHub,
- before StackOverflow,
- before jsfiddles,
- before snippets on gist or pastebin
- before very common web forums (many of which were eventually written in PHP in fact)...
- before fantastic search results of google...
Best you could hope for when you got stuck? Someone's personal web page, or usenet and mailing lists...