A developer who is new to a technology absolutely needs to read the documents. No matter how good or bad, it's important because it probably tells you a lot of stuff you wouldn't learn on your own (or that someone else will teach you wrong).

I do a lot of GCP work anymore, and the amount of devs who make service authentication way more complicated than it needs to be is really freaking high. It's clear that the people who kicked off the project are pulling blocks from SO rather than RTFM because the FM has a simple decision tree for how to use authentication. Reading through the docs could have saved these projects each hours of time, simplified deployment and reduced the security risks associated with passing around json auth tokens (or worse: checking them into VCS.

Cases where docs are not enough:

- Beginners do not understand doc's jargon, or they need to learn too much stuffs to understand it that they'd rather quit. So they end up relying on third party sources/implementations

- No English knowledge and no translations

I agree with the criticisms, my point is that there are many beginners in a state where the most rational or practical choice is to sacrifice quality by following third party resources.

I have a spanish-speaking group where me and others teach beginners programming, and many of them cannot use the docs, whether because of a language barrier, or a lack of foundational knowledge, and all they care is to get things done, otherwise they'd get discouraged and abandon it before even starting

On the other hand: if you are developing software, you're going to have to be able to at least read English, and if you don't understand the jargon, that just means that your starting point isn't just the docs, but also a jargon lookup.

People generally just want to cut corners and 'be done with it' which simply results in lower quality.

I'd be surprised if the documents for any sufficiently large project did not include a "Getting started" section designed for beginners.

Everyone of your users will start off as a beginner, it behooves project creators to ensure that beginner documentation is great.

Lacking ability to read books.

Not be harsh. But if someone is going to just quit because of jargon (which everyone has to learn btw) then Sayōnara.

Sometimes you have to read the docs

“But the docs are poorly written” you say

“But the docs aren’t maintained well” you say

Read the docs. Sometimes it isn’t supposed to be easy. Or fun. Or fit together well. But that’s the job.

RTFM is the best technical advice I’ve been given and can give.

I've often found "read the docs" leaves you with too many options for many libraries. A lot of libraries have community preferences that aren't captured in the docs. If you pick the non-standard implementation, you may paint yourself into a corner with plugins and maintenance - even though the way you choose is completely sufficient.

Obviously. If the docs are garbage then you are going to have to find alternatives. However these days devs have never had it better.

I've worked in a lot of places where there were no docs and nobody knew how any worked. So be thankful that you have some docs.

And I've worked with auto generated meta code in Java 1.3.

In practice, difference between it and Oracle docs was negligible. Hell. Their auto-gen code was more self explanatory than Oracle Java Docs.

I personally enjoy the Javadocs that tell me nothing about how to use the damn thing. Spending hours poring over it, with no examples, just a generated Javaoc version of the static types my IDE would have told me, and through much trial and error, I eventually figure out that I need -

new Doer(UnrelatedFactory.create("foo", new WTFBar(), 5, null, null), RandomEnumFromADifferentPackage.MEANINGLESS_VALUE, true).do()

But I'm not really convinced such documents are helpful. I mean, technically they're better than nothing (as in, literally better than nothing), but the difference between nothing and those docs is so small it approaches nothing ('as the worthlessness of the documentation approaches infinity the value of reading them approaches nothing', as it were)