Switched from YouTube tutorials to official docs, glad I did

For my first 3 months learning Python, I only watched video walkthroughs. They were easy to follow, but I kept hitting weird problems whenever the tutorial used an older version. Last week I finally read the actual docs for the requests library, and it cleared up about 80% of the confusion I had. The examples in there are short and direct, not padded with 10 minutes of intro chatter. Now I check docs first, then go back to videos only if I need a visual. Anyone else find official docs way less scary once you actually try them?

1 comments

1 Comment

betty_shah1mo ago

The 2.4 version of requests was what finally broke me too. I had a video where everything worked fine, but my code kept throwing errors until I looked at the changelog and saw they removed a bunch of old stuff. Did you also notice how the docs have a "quickstart" page that takes like 5 minutes to read, but solves most problems? I still use videos for things like debugging or seeing how a whole project fits together, but for any single function or library, docs are just faster now. One thing I'm still stuck on is figuring out when the docs are actually outdated themselves, you know? Like how do you know if the official source is even up to date?

-2