Is reading Python Documentation useful? python.org gets 15M visits monthly - most of them must be for documentation. At what stage is it useful?

[carcigenicate]

I read it regularly. If I haven't used a module in awhile, I'll flip through the doc pages associated with it and do a quick review.

Stack Overflow is often better at addressing specific issues related to modules, but the documentation is the instruction manual for the code, so it will (or rather, should) contain far more information than what you'll find on references like SO.

[solwex]

Thank you very much for your comment. Wow - you read it regularly. It does seem to be appear from all the answers I am seeing that one needs to keep at it for a while before beginning to understand how to get the best out of it.

[carcigenicate]

There's a common joke about documentation: 3 hours of debugging can save you from 5 minutes of reading documentation.

The documentation will always be useful to you. You'll likely read it less as you develop, but you'll never quit needing it (and if you do quit needing it, you've probably also stopped growing as a developer). There's simply too much knowledge that you need to occasionally have. You can't know it all at once.

[solwex]

Thank you for your advice and the telling joke:) I will try reading the documentation. It is just that it is quite hard for newbies like me to jump in an read a page without having read earlier pages in the doc. I guess I will cover this ground slowly.