[freehunter]

Agreed. This absolutely kills me when people say “just read the documentation” or “the documentation is very good” as a reason why they don’t produce examples or templates or starter kits. Not all of us are CS majors or programmers in large teams or with decades of experience to fall back on. Just reading the documentation isn’t enough to get me into a new framework or language. I need to see practical examples.

For mobile development, this is why Expo was so crucial for me to understand how React Native works.

[wool_gather]

Apple used to have a lot of pretty good (not perfect, but pretty good) conceptual/architectural documentation. Most of it has sadly been sunset, and is hard to find, even though it's still largely applicable. And it hasn't been replaced -- hopefully that's just "hasn't been replaced yet".

[Ididntdothis]

Apple documentation in the 90s was a piece of beauty. Microsoft's was pretty good too back then with MSDN Library CDs.

[cschep]

This is so true and so sad. It was so good!

[afarrell]

> I need to see practical examples

And I need to see diagrams of mental models, though practical examples help solidify that. So one challenge with writing documentation is knowing what your audience needs. A better taxonomy of documentation would help solve this. For now, here is one I like based on https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/

- Tutorial: A walk through how to learn the basics as you build something.

- Explanation: Showing the mental model of something

- Guide: A walk through how to solve a specific problem

- Reference: A comprehensive* listing of the API capabilities and how they are used.

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If anyone knows of some good tutorials or explanations of mobile programming with React, I'd be grateful for recommendations.

[tonyedgecombe]

Apple seems to be particularly bad for this, I was going through some of their videos recently and everything assumed prior knowledge. It's the same for much of the documentation.

As much as I criticise Microsoft at least they have stuff like this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/learnwin32/le...