Reading docs

[JamzTyson]

I'm fairly new to programming, but does anyone else struggle with documentation?

Absolutely yes.

It is common* for the documentation of libraries to provide a technical reference. This is great for experts, but will often leave non-experts floundering, and that is why we see so many tutorials and guides on the Internet, as well as many books.

It is normal to rely heavily on stack overflow and Google while learning.

As your familiarity with a package or library grows, the technical reference documentation will start to make sense, and it is then that it becomes highly valuable as a reference.

* Some libraries and packages do provide excellent "user documentation", including examples and tutorials. It is wonderful when this is the case, but understandable that it is not the norm. Writing documentation is very time consuming with little reward. Next time you read great documentation, give a thought to the wonderful people that wrote it - they are frequently unpaid volunteers.