In the good 'ole days, I'd work completely offline, using only the documentation provided by Microsoft in Visual Studio. It was complete, correct, and had samples. No distractions, not googling, and no HN out of the blue!
Always look for adequate docs before adopting any library into a project. It is a lesson you need taught only once.
And it was quite good. You could learn just about everything you needed to work from it, offline and from one source.
There are many things I did not like about Microsoft back then but their developer ecosystem was not one of them. Tools were expensive and closed but quite complete and well put together.
Until I learned about open source and free software I considered MSDN to be the pinnacle of how software development should be.
These days it just feels like MS can't decide between free or prosperity and so can't seem to get either one right.
Also, another H/T for Rails docs, they are very good... but far from comprehensive