Probably, the most underrated and unused by beginner programmers yet one of the most important and useful source of knowledge in programming are official manuals, also known as official documentation, for programming languages and tools.
Maybe, this is because the words “official documentation” sound so boring, or because of the tedious and meticulous language these texts are often written in.
Anyway, if you’re trying to avoid reading official manuals for programming languages and tools (especially for tools), you’re making a huge mistake, since you’re neglecting the most thorough and accurate answers to your questions.
And all those answers are right here, in front of you, there’s no need to spend time seeking them somewhere else. Just open the official website, and you’ll find what you’re after.
Personally, when I was a beginner programmer, I used to make this mistake too. I opened the official documentation for some tool I needed to use in one of my projects, like jQuery (it used to be a popular tool that saved you a lot of time when you developed web pages), and instantly got disappointed: it’s so immense and detailed!
I only needed the answer to my little specific beginner’s question. Why did I have to read all of this just to get the solution to my simple problem?
So, of course, I didn’t read it. I went to Google and tried to find a direct answer to my question somewhere else, usually on Stack Overflow or tool-specific forums.
Sometimes it worked right away, sometimes I just wasted several hours on attempts to compose the search query more specifically, hoping that it will finally bring me the page with the solution I craved.
Since I’m a quite persistent guy, in most cases I succeeded in such a quest. But almost every time the answer I needed, found in some programmer’s blog post or on a Stack Overflow page, simply cited the official manual page I visited several hours ago.
Had I spent only ten minutes reading that page without unnecessary rush, I would not only got what I needed much sooner, but would also understand better what I was about to use, since I would have read the entire documentation page instead of just a short excerpt from it.
Often times a good official manual is all you need
Good official documentation might have a brilliant “Getting Started Guide” or a textual tutorial, which can be even better than any video tutorial or book created by people having no connection to the development of this particular language or tool.
I’ve seen a lot of popular articles and non-official tutorials merely paraphrasing the official ones. Perhaps, they added some little details or more clear explanations of some particular topics, but usually you’d barely miss something important if you just stuck to the official manual.
And, of course, official documentation is usually available for free. So, at least, there are no reasons not to check it out when you need some additional information about the tool or the programming language you’re using right now.
However, don’t start learning programming with the official manual
Nevertheless, official documentation might be just too huge and monotonous to be the first choice for the beginner programmer.
And if it’s not a special beginner’s guide, then the content of such a manual can also be hard to understand if you’re not an experienced developer.
It might presume that you already know a lot of fundamental programming concepts which you’re unlikely to be familiar with if you only started to learn programming recently.
Also in such a case it won’t have a structure of a learning material. It will be more like a regular reference book, without the logical beginning and the end.
So, even though official documentation is definitely a must when you have at least some basic knowledge of and prior experience in programming (for example, when you’ve already completed some video tutorials), usually it’s not the best choice as an introduction to programming language or programming tool for a beginner developer.
When to use official documentation for programming languages
If you want to learn a programming language, start with a video tutorial in order to understand the basics and to see how the most important elements of the language are used in practice.
Then read a book about this programming language to extend your knowledge and to make it much more thorough and complete.
Now that you start using this language in practice, it’s time to recall that the official documentation for your programming language does exist.
It might be useful, for example, when you forget some command or function name you saw in the video tutorial or in the book, and urgently need it right now.
If you still remember vaguely what it does or how its name might sound, often it will be much quicker to find all the information about it on the website containing the official documentation.
Using an automated search engine on such a website is always better than trying to find the specific file and the exact time in the video tutorial, or the specific page in the 500-page book (especially if you have the paper one).
Also, since no “digestible” video tutorial or book can cover every possible fact about a programming language, at this point official documentation will help you understand even better what you already know, by polishing your knowledge with tiny new details and examples of use.
My main programming language is JavaScript, so when I have some language-related doubts or knowledge gaps, I usually go to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript and use a search box. Or I just open Google, enter the same keywords I’d use on the Mozilla Developer Network website, and look for the MDN page in the top ten search results.
It will always be there as the most reliable source of information about JavaScript. Mozilla Foundation is one of the major organizations developing this programming language, so the JavaScript documentation available on their website can be deemed official.
When to use official documentation for programming tools
With programming tools (Bootstrap, jQuery, React, etc.) it’s a little bit different. It’s also the best decision to start with a video tutorial that will show you how to use the most important functions of this tool in a real project, which an author of the tutorial is usually creating during the lessons to illustrate their words.
But after this stage you rarely need books — now your choice is official documentation. It will help you use this tool in your projects by extending your knowledge with many additional details omitted in the tutorial, and by answering to your specific applied questions when you write code.
For example, Bootstrap includes a vast variety of elements helping to create in minutes even the most complex forms, with different types of fields, checkboxes, and buttons, which are used heavily in web applications.
If the tutorial you’ve watched was about development of a simple website with Bootstrap, there probably was no room to show you all these options. But they exist, and you can easily discover them simply glancing over the table of contents of the official documentation.
Even the most elaborated video tutorials usually show how to create with the given tool only some specific type of projects (for example, a to-do list app), they cannot show everything this tool can offer you. It’s just impossible to create a real project that would use every single function and component that a multipurpose programming tool provides a programmer with.
A good video tutorial will give you a “taste” of the programming tool, show you the best practices, and teach you how to create a particular application or website. It is a robust base allowing you to knowingly decide whether you want to use this tool in your projects, and, if your decision is positive, how to write your code: where to begin, how to structure it, etc.
For more information, or when you don’t know how exactly to write code for a task of a kind that wasn’t covered in a video tutorial, you should go to the official website of this tool and read the documentation there.
So, usually programmers watch video tutorials to get themselves familiar with the tools, and then switch to official documentation as they use these tools in practice.
The more experienced programmer you’ll become, the more often you’ll use official manuals, since when you know what exactly you want to find and have enough experience and background knowledge to grasp almost any new information about programming, official documentation is by far the best thing you can use.
You don’t need to memorize everything about programming tools
Official documentation for programming tools is a great thing also because it allows you to focus on your projects instead of learning hundreds of specific programming commands and functions by heart.
It’s helpful to briefly discover them while watching tutorials, but the only fact you should really remember after such video lessons is that those commands and functions exist, and that you can learn all the details about them from the official documentation when (and if) the time comes.
Read it only when you need it. You’ll learn everything you do have to know about any particular programming tool along the way, using it in your code regularly.
When it comes to programming tools, learning everything by heart doesn’t make sense for several reasons.
Firstly, there will likely be so many tools you’ll need to use in your work that it will be simply impossible to keep everything in mind.
If you want to learn everything perfectly before using it, you’ll stick in a never-ending learning marathon (also known as “tutorial hell”), and simply won’t have time to write code for real projects. This would be nothing but another one form of procrastination.
Secondly, while programming languages are more or less “frozen” in terms of their changes (they can easily exist for decades without a slightest alteration), programming tools are being constantly developed and changed by their creators. What worked a year ago might not work today after you upgraded to the newest version of the tool, and the easiest way to find out how it works now is to read official documentation.
Also, many programming tools quickly become obsolete while the new ones emerge and become a new standard, and this happens not that rarely. This makes even more obvious that the idea of learning everything about programming tools by heart is not worth it.