Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggregoire | Hacker News Reader

Reading/watching random tutorials and asking basic questions on SO __instead of reading the official docs__ is a trend I've observed for the last 10 years. Even for stuff pretty well documented like Python, Postgres, React, etc.

View on HN

Most official documentation is awful, and just an API reference. It's (almost) like asking someone to learn english and then pointing them to a dictionary.

And that's because a lot of devs think it's perfectly dandy to just put perfunctory docstrings in their methods, point it at whatever "doc generation" tool, wire it up to a github.io domain and call it a day.

There is a reason people crave, want and seek things like SO and blog-posts. They're packed full of insight, working examples and just plain old "how TF do you use this thing". Oh and of course, the "this problem A didn't work when using setup B and C, and that's because of reasons X,Y,Z. Here, try H,I & K and it'll work.

I remember writing a Twitter library when that was a thing, and being severely disappointed at the quality of the API documentation. There seemed to be little choice other than to experiment to see what responses you’d receive (and hope that it wouldn’t change underneath you). Same was often true with some of the GitHub APIs, although it’s been a few years since I’ve spent time with them.

> Most official documentation is awful

This goes doubly so for google cloud documentation. Firebase docs are decent, but if you're a developer who's gotten used to google's documentation style I could see skipping right over it.

For many years entire sections across multiple pages of firebase's documentation were missing after the site contents had been migrated from one system to another.

Multiple years of sample code and examples just cut out from the middle of pages.

When I was building on firebase it took me a long time to reconstruct exactly how certain aspects of the system were supposed to work just because of those missing docs.

That's true but people still do it for well documented stuff like Vue, Svelte and the R that shall not be named. Two wrongs that don't make a right

I often wonder how much this can be attributed to the pretty awful SEO of most documentation. I write mostly Python at work and it's infuriating how often GeeksForGeeks, W3Schools, Programiz, or RealPython pop up when I'm just trying to reference like, the arg order of a builtin, or the particular behavior. Django is worse, I often feel like I can't even find the doc when I know it's there and read it before.

Documentation is largely static content. It isn't their job to play SEO games to convince search engines to surface it in the query results. Documentation is not a revenue generator for Google so it gets buried below the sites with Doubleclick ads.

Attempting to find the relevant docs page via search engines is generally not a good way to go, you should go to the documentation and search from there. Bookmark the landing page of the documentation.

This is why I switched to Kagi.com it gives me results that are much more sane for things I'm looking for when it comes to a programming stance

For native documentation, why not just search the official docs at https://docs.python.org/ ?

I find it to be very discoverable if you are looking for docs about a specific function or module.

People have already given many ideas, but if you use DuckDuckGo they have bangs for searching various python docs. Here's a page that lets you search which ones are available: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Also, many pieces of software whose "documentation" is just some examples of its use.

Yeah, the official docs for python rarely if ever show up on the first two pages of search unless I do `from: python.org`.

Google is really good at surfacing random blogs and SO questions instead of the official docs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com