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Comment by Shorel

2 years ago

Yes, too many cookbooks, "with solutions and examples", and no one writes good reference manuals any more.

I kind of get it. I think about a problem, and I am solution focused. Furthermore, I want to learn what I need to implement the solution, and usually don't pay attention to other features that are not directly related to my problem.

However, by giving me a cookbook, the documentators are doing me a disservice in two ways: first, they are greatly limiting the amount of solutions I can use. If my problem is not something they already imagined, I need to find another cookbook or read their source code to find out how to solve it.

And second: they are taking away from me the process of learning about the different parts of the system and how to integrate them into a solution by myself.

And the gotchas are endless. I am using FastAPI and the amount of things I have no idea how they work underneath, until something fails, is mind wrecking.

I wish there was some real reference manual of it, not just the autogenerated function signatures and the most minimally useful documentation I have ever seen. So many things make no sense, and I have to second guess the FastAPI designers all the time.