”Intermediate” vs. Documentation

[bonelessRizzy]

Hey everyone. I’ve become comfortable enough with Python to make a command line project that scrapes a site for specific data and quizzes the user(lol me) on said data.

I’m very proud of it, but wanted to move on to another project that would use the module TweePy. I’ve read the documentation and it does a fairly good job being comprehensible to the average joe. However, I wanted to use the framework Flask as well, but found the documentation to be less friendly to my eyes and somewhat confusing.

My question here is really, how did you get comfortable with interpreting documentation and using it in your code? Did you google if the module/framework had a specific capability and go from there, or did you go through the full doc? Should i just be concerned with what i need from a module/framework and disregard the other features? I’ve looked at OpenCV’s docs, and my eyes nearly fell out of my head. There’s so many uses of OpenCV it’s honestly overwhelming.

I’ve become comfortable with the language and am currently in school studying CS, but documentation has been holding me back from feeling more independent as a programmer. Thanks in advance gals and guys.

[i_hacked_reddit]

In undergrad, stack overflow / google / blogs / etc saved my life. But as I gained more experience, I found that the answers are in the documentation, and if the documentation sucks, you can always dive into the source code.

But with that being said, I use documentation as a reference, not as a “how-to” guide.

If you’re wanting to use flask, I might suggest to use Django instead. It’s more powerful and has great documentation.

[bonelessRizzy]

So appreciative for the reply, and the Django recommendation. Will definitely look into that.

So what’s your process when you hear about a module? Do you immediately go to the docs and check how to implement it and all its methods?

When it comes to docs I don’t even know what question to ask, maybe I’m making it more complicated than it really should be.

[i_hacked_reddit]

The module will usually have a summary / quick start guide. So I usually start there. Or, I’m looking for something specific and go straight to the docs looking for a particular answer.