[the_only_law]

I’ve had the opposite experience. I’ve attempted to read a number of specs, and by the way I’m completely unable to parse them, you’d assume I was illiterate. On the other hand, I’ve found good, technical articles detailing how the same things worked and have found them much more digestible.

[JJMcJ]

Sometimes the official docs are just right. Django is good, for example. I had to do small Ubuntu sysadmin task recently, the tutorials I found were incomprehensible. The official docs were crystal clear.

But we've all seen the reverse, as well, and a combination of SO, YouTube, Reddit, and random tutorials is the only way to figure it out. Especially when you encounter the "This describes version 3.1, and everything in 4.5 is completely different, good luck" official docs.

[bigwavedave]

For me personally, the answer is a combination of the two. Having the docs open side-by-side with a good technical write-up usually helps me understand a lot faster and better than either resource does on its own.

[jimpudar]

If you're competent enough to judge the technical article's credibility, this can be a good supplement to the official docs. I see junior developers running into this problem more often because they don't know how to tell the difference between a quality writeup and a garbage tutorial written by somebody trying to pad their blog.

There are definitely cases where the official docs (or RFCs) are practically incomprehensible to a newcomer, but I usually will try and come back to them quickly after getting a foothold using a blog post or YouTube video.

I find that even with the best technical writeups, there are often things applicable to MY use case that may not have been relevant to the author. The official docs (or sometimes the source) is the best place to find out about those.