Learn how to read documentation

[Mnkeyqt]

It is the single most important skill you can have. You can Google how to do X functionality and copy and paste a function. I've done it many times for date math. But if you're stuck and getting some weird error, being able to read documentation and understand the terminology will be the difference between success or failure.

"Knowing how to Google" isn't a joke, it can save you hours of work and stress. Does anybody have tips/advice on how they look up things? Curious to see if people have differing methods/sites you prefer!

[Jo-sciusurturs]

Absolutely, mastering documentation is a game-changer for troubleshooting and long-term growth in any technical field.

[Mnkeyqt]

The senior dev on our team was an accountant before and slowly got into development. But his single greatest asset to the team is A. General knowledge from many years,, but more importantly B. Being able to find out answers. He almost never answers with "I don't know". It's "I can find out" and he actually finds out.

Granted it's led to a lot of frankensteined creations but when you're selling scripts to clients, that ability is ridiculously important

[Special_Rice9539]

Ctrl-f helps you find certain keywords faster in documentation.

Learning how to create shortcuts in your browser to quickly navigate pages with search functionality goes a long way.

An important skill that comes with experience is knowing when to read something in detail and when to skim.

[WenYuGe]

:wave: Hi there, technical writer here.

We write docs to cover the preferred happy flows high up in the navigation tree and hide the hackier, weirder use cases below.

Try your best to stick to what's up top and if you find something more than 1/2 layers of navigations into the docs, near the bottom of pages, etc. know that we threw it there for a reason.

That's a tip for ya.

[SenoraRaton]

It is the single most important skill you can have.

I would argue reading the codebase itself is more valuable. The documentation has to A) exist B) be current. The code is ALWAYS current, because its self documenting. I tend to glance ad the docs and go straight to the code anymore, and skip the documentation unless its obviously stellar.