[jfaucett]

"If the developer/community of a language, framework, library, etc. etc. haven't taken the time to write good documentation and provide some examples,".

I couldnt agree more. It takes a lot of time and sweat to make a good library or framework, writing up some examples takes very little time in comparison and when the developer/team hasnt gone the last mile here, it usually makes me think they havent done it with their framework as well.

Also "What do people think of documenting first" well, theres a great talk by Tom Warner about README driven development that is just about this, and Im a huge fan of it. Work out how you would like to use your library before you program it, and as an added bonus you have documentation at the end.

Also as an added note to other devs reading this, I care much less about "API docs" because I get the same thing from just reading the source. Id be perfectly content with examples.