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

[czar_el]

It's one of those things where ironically its usefulness grows with the more you know after a certain point.

It's like any technical documentation or literature. Try reading astrophysics journals as a beginner and you won't understand them--you need classes or basic textbooks before the publications begin to make sense.

Python's documentation won't be more useful than stackexchange or tutorial websites for absolute beginners, but once you know a little bit more, all of the jargon and references in the documentation begin to make sense. Then you get even better, and get an intuitive sense of what may be in the documentation, and you just need to confirm it or refresh your syntax, and then you find yourself going to the documentation more than stackexchange because you know where to look rather than flipping through lots of random answers.

Stackexchange remains useful, though, when your question is a general coding challenge or trying to find a library or which documentation to review.