| Completely disagree, and you're wrong. Depending on the area you're looking into: 1. Many Stack Overflow answers do not exist in documentation at all. 2. Some answers are especially valuable because they touch issues in actual production (which are not foreseeable by documentation). 3. Answers (chronologically given) help ongoing document changes in APIs, which many documentation don't do or make it very difficult to do. Take Python's Tkinter for instance - a lot of answers in in Stack Overflow supplement many things not covered by the official documentation. You'd either have to look at Tcl's documentation (but have no idea where to look, or how to read it), or figure out the source code yourself which will be confusing since the official documentation does not actually document every part of the library that it's sourced/ported from even though they exist for use. 4. SO answers often point you in the right direction, or to third party explanations and sources, and often compare between different semantic versions. (E.g. answers for D3 in JS often compare changes between APIs in the different versions 4, 5 and 6.) While official documentation sometimes chronicle their API changes, comparative usages/change in idiomatic usages are not always elucidated and it is in Stack Overflow that many of those are found. |