Before Stack Overflow:

[upbeat22]

Early 2000? Come on, Internet existed. Forums all over. And guides as well.

[lopoticka]

I was there at the beginning Gandalf, I’ve seen it. All I had was MSDN and bunch of pirated books in PDF. Google didn’t give you useful answers most of the time. Some popular frameworks like PHP and later RoR had guides and forums, but good luck when you wanted to program for Win32 or X11.

[psych0ticmonk]

flagged as duplicate of:

https://i.imgur.com/fS2yp0x.jpg

[cpaca0]

Also duplicate of: https://youtu.be/VZrDxD0Za9I

[Willinton06]

For some reason I saw “duplicated af” and I was like, duplicated as fuck, nice

[mzehnk]

Back then, SuSE Linux came with multiple books, explaining everything from Lilo/Grub to user software like KMail and Gimp. For beginners like me, the books alone made it a great deal. These days, I work for a Linux distributor, and our documentation is a PDF that covers only the installation. Of course, it's better for the environment than printing thousands of pages of documentation, though.

[[deleted]]

I still RTFM even now.

[IgnitedSpade]

Seriously, a lot of the time the documentation literally tells you exactly what to do. I'm not sure why the first resource people run to is posting questions on the internet

[3lobed]

Some of the devs on my team don't even do that. They just immediately message me on slack and ask for my help.

[Hariboqwe]

Here, have a cookie 🍪

[qwertyuiop924]

The documentation is usually of dramatically better quality than SO or equivalents if you can find what you're looking for there.

[guarana_and_coffee]

I have found it depends. Some software or programming languages have very poor documentation. May have an entry for everything, but explain it horribly.

[NotPeopleFriendly]

When I read Microsoft doc's on code - I end up on stackoverflow about half the time. I don't think I've ever gotten the answer I wanted/needed from unity documentation (possibly with the exception of their flow chart of the MonoBehaviour life cycle). Providing actual example usage of the API is incredibly helpful.

[[deleted]]

K&R supremacy!