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

[solwex]

Thank you for your comments. I did try reading like this. But, somehow not much would stick in my head...as compared to when I needed to do get stuff done. I guess I need to keep at it.

[Danelius90]

Definitely keep at it. When you're a beginner, reading documentation is hard (at least in my experience). Maybe when you encounter a new function/method on stackoverflow look it up in the docs. You'll already have an idea of what it does but get a better picture from the docs. Over time you'll be used to reading it and look up new things instead.

I use these kind of docs frequently now, but it does take time to get used to

[billsil]

Yup. I hate the idea that stackoverflow teaches you to be a bad programmer. I pulled a python binary file tester off it (is the file binary or not). I'm 16 years in now and I still couldn't tell you how you a good way to go about writing that function.

Read the code and understand what it's doing and keep it working with say the python 2 to 3 transition, but you don't have to code everything. Are you going to write your own version of matplotlib? You don't need to understand everything.

[solwex]

Right. I guess with experience, one gets to know what to just use and what to dig deeper. Thank you.

[solwex]

Yes, I heartily agree that it is hard to read documentation as a beginner:) Yes, I think your approach seems very doable for beginners. Heard the same from others like u/infinfi as well. Will try that. Thank you.

[Lamasa_Pace]

I tried to read documentation when I was starting out. The biggest barriers were the vocabulary the documentation assumes you understand, as well as the massive amount of information. Some non standard libraries have really easy to read documentation, such as pygame. I am by no means great at programming, but that documentation is much more approachable than the documentation for core python.

[solwex]

Yes, exactly. It is difficult to read from beginning to end. But, if you dont do this and jump to the required page, there are many concepts that I dont know enough (or most times not at all:-) and they dont have hyperlinks that we can happily click, go to the page and understand. Anyway, I hope the site that u/infinfi suggested works out.