Hacker News Reader

Comment by genwin | Hacker News Reader

> Admittedly I am mostly a C# developer and Microsoft does a really good job when it comes to documentation, at least in most cases.

I too use StackOverflow as a reference manual. Often the #1 answer is the concise example I'm looking for. MS documentation is a last resort for me.

View on HN

Why that? I consider the MSDN library one of the best documentation out there.

It's great when you have time to spare, to learn every nuance of a thing. It's worse than alternatives when you quickly want an example to copy/paste, which is usually my case.

For instance, compare googling for "c# run sql query msdn" vs. "c# run sql query stackoverflow". The latter has the better example and it's closer to the top.

From that I assume that you are not a professional developer, right? I never thought about in from that perspective but I think we should actually discourage copying and adopting code. It will probably solve your current problem in shorter time but I am quite confident that really understanding what you and your code are doing will benefit you in the long term way more, for example when you have to fix bugs, make changes or solve a similar problem.

Agreed! Been developing for a looong time. I switch between languages and OS's a lot. Say I'm switching back to Powershell after a hiatus and I can't remember if it's "if (this) {" or "if this {". StackOverflow may be my fastest way to find the answer and also get an if/else/elseif block to copy/paste/modify. Non-trivial code I copy/paste gets understood thoroughly and often heavily modified!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com