How to get good at reading documentation?

#1

Hi All. I’m Hails, I’m a software engineer, and I joined VizHub this month. First, I want thank Curran and the VizHub team for making such an extraordinary resource - the course material, platform, and community of VizHub is the best I’ve seen from anywhere else. Thank you all for helping others in their data visualization journeys.

Second, I wanted to ask if anybody had any advice for getting really good at reading documentation?

One of the ways you develop as an engineer is by learning to venture out on your own (i.e. try new technologies by yourself). And a large part of that is reading the documentation. Does anybody have advice or resources in learning how to read documentation so it doesn’t feel like a wave of undecipherable information? Are there strategies to use when reading documentation so you walk away with what you need?

Thanks all, cheers.
p.s. this is my twitter (@whatuphails) – let’s be friends.

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#2

What’s up Hails? :wink:

Nice topic!! I’m no software engineer, I’m physics engineer. I do read documentations usually they have a Quick Start. For me coding is a tool to solve (everyday) problems.

But I will be honest most of the time I use google to go to the docs where I know that is close to what I’m looking. Any documentation in particular are you talking about?
If general, check this or maybe this.

I would love to know how @curran deals with documentation… :wink:

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#3

Thanks, Maion for the great resources - that YouTube video was particularly helpful.

No documentation is particular. I think my question comes mainly from 1) not wanting to feel so overwhelmed when looking at new documentation all the time, and 2) sometimes I have to remind myself that like many other tech words that sound fancy, at its core “documentation” is really just a fancy word for something somewhat simple, which in instance is an instruction manual. Nothing to be scared of.

p.s. that’s so cool you’re a physics engineer.

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#4

Great question! To me there are really two “genres” of useful documentation:

  • Google search results, usually StackOverflow or bespoke tutorials not written by the author of the thing
  • Official documentation, written by the author of the thing and typicaly very detail oriented and comprehensive

Both have their place.

In the course of doing work, I often Google for solutions, open the first 5 links at the same time, and skim all of them looking for patterns and overlap between the answers. This is great when you need to know “how it all fits together”. It doesn’t much matter the source but StackOverflow is great for this sort of thing.

Other times, when I know how things fit together generally and need to know something very specific, this is when I go for the official documentation. Think official D3 documentation or MDN Docs. In this case it’s important to be cognizant of the specific version of the thing you’re using (especially with D3, where there have been breaking changes across the major versions).

Hope this helps! All the best!

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#5

Awesome. Thank you, Curran. I appreciate the guidance.

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#6

Hey Hail! Thanks for liking my viz! Following you on twitter, would be awesome to share ideas abou interactive visualizations!

Peace!

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