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@matt-jd I give you this acronym:
WITFM: Where Is The Fucking Manual.
Some stuff has TFM, and then most of the time TFM sucks. Really really sucks (looking at you google. isUserAGoat... ffs). Nobody likes to write proper documentation, and no ine has the time. And then update it.
Also - when you just want to do one simple thing - TFM Does not help you. If you just want this one small thing, and not the full history of the thing - SO is there for you.
SO does not promote understaning. It promotes lazyness, and ignorance. and copypasta code. But the solution can't be RTFM. reason? WITFM. SO might know.
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@magicMirror good point, my post was more aimed towards the people who are to reliant on SO to motivate them to find other ways because there's a lot of times SO can't help you as well
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I barely use SO at all and could easily live without it. 75% of the time I just reference the official docs, and when that's insufficient, I usually manage to find a relevant blog post or something.
I've used it for personal projects but I'm not sure if I've ever needed it at work. They could have blocked it, for all I know. -
SO has been useful for documenting browser quirks with JS and CSS. Other than that, I barely use it.
Yes, sometimes the manual sucks or is inaccurate, but I disagree with the statement in here that most docs suck. If you actually think so, please consider reading more docs to get better at extracting information from them. -
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SO is quire a good reference but you should not just copy/paste but try to understand the answers.
If its just code, look for another answer that explains the why.
Also, its very important to write good questions, unfortunately some SO users can be quite unforgiving of lazy questions and you do get better and more explaining answers with a good written question.
Related Rants
Stackoverflow.
That moment when
#truestory
Okay so for all of you who think that you can't do shit without stackoverflow. I'll tell you this, fuck SO. There's this ancient technique of programmers of old probably just about 20-25 years ago called RTFM. Why bother copy pasting some one else's spaghetti(that you might not fully understand) when you can write your own better code! (said in good faith). When something is behaving strange or you don't know what something requires just hit the docs or manual and read about the api because it is describes not only what it wants and needs but also what it does. So try this because it might have more information that you need than stack overflow might tell you
rant
stackoverflow
so
rtfm