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Brittany
Brittany

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Day 55 : #100DaysofCode - In Need of Advice on Reading Poorly Written Documentation

Today I worked on my Rails project all day. I am determined to get it up and running as soon as possible. However, as I add more components I am finding myself reading more and more documentation. I love reading and learning, but does anyone have advice for reading poorly written documentation? Or what do you do when you are on a tight timeframe and need to add a gem and the documentation is 3,000 pages long (sarcasm, but also real)?

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I am losing my mind!!!!

I usually read the documentation, add code to my project, pray it works. If the prayer does not work then I search for the error via google. If that does not work, then I watch a tutorial on youtube. I know this can be time consuming at times and I wanted to know if anyone else had any advice on how to read documentation and if it gets better with time.

Since I spent the day working on my rails project and trying to interpret documentation, I was unable to continue on my todo code-along. However, I hope to have a better update sometime this week on adding user authorization.

Oh and I was not kidding, I really would love advice from on best practices on reading poorly written documentation, until then I will keep reading, coding, learning, and growing.

As always thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Brittany

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Top comments (2)

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tarise profile image
Nikki

I'm my experience, when the documentation is that bad and it's hard to move forward, I go right to reading the underlying code.

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sincerelybrittany profile image
Brittany

SMART! Reading the underlying code can be helpful too. I may have to make some pull request for updating documentation in the future.