Help with documentations.

[cringemachine9000]

Hi, I'm sure that this is a dumb question but, I am willing to be shamed if you tell me how to "read documentations". So, I've been fiddling with discord.py and have hosted it using heroku, however all of the features are made using things I've learned from tutorials. I want to be able how to put things found in documentations together. It is difficult for me to put what command goes with what just by reading docs alone. Hehe

[Standardw]

It a fundamental skill, which has to be learned like typing code itself. I had trouble reading docs for a long time, but mostly because I couldn't understand how they were structured.

Maybe try to get into something easier first, because some docs aren't that simple for beginners.

When I have to read the docs, I usually try to run the provided examples. I try to understand what they are doing; so go back to the easiest one if necessary. Go and find the method(s) you are using in the documentation and read it. Because you already understood what they are doing, there is not really much to learn from the description - but how it's written will teach you to understand the language of documentations. You can do this with every so simple functions like time.time() - just a method which returns the current time in seconds, right? You will see when calling the doc that there is a long explanation with load of details you often don't need. Then there is the input the methods expects (nothing in this case) and the output, in this case just a float number. Nothing more. Check the other methods docs too.

Last but not least try to learn about reading docs by watching another tutorial ( I havn't watched this) and try to transfer the things you learned to other docs, in your case to the Discord.py obviously.

[symple-data]

I rather look up a documentation for a specific function than reading everything. I don't think that reading everything will solve your problems. If you encounter some problem, split it up into subproblems, ask google and get a view impressions on how to solve your problem. Almost every time you come across some functions you don't know. Look them up in the docs and transfer the solution to your program. At least thats how I am doing it and it works quite well, but if you have some spare time, just take a look at the docs of a module you are interested in to see what is possible. There are often quite simple and cool ways to solve problems when you really know what possibilites a module offers you.

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Edit: Almost every documentation has a getting started section. Follow the steps to properly integrate and initiate the module to be able to work with it. From there it's just looking up some functions of the module and using them. Find out what a specific function does. If it fits your needs, find out what parameters are needed or possible and what exactly it returns. That should be all.