I regret not knowing about cross-platform development such as Flutter and ReactOS. I also regret not buying a book explaining all the concepts in as simple a manner as possible. As a semi-amateur programmer, I feel like most of the documentation is meant to refresh the memories of people who have been developing apps for years; they're extremely beginner-hostile.
Agreed. This absolutely kills me when people say “just read the documentation” or “the documentation is very good” as a reason why they don’t produce examples or templates or starter kits. Not all of us are CS majors or programmers in large teams or with decades of experience to fall back on. Just reading the documentation isn’t enough to get me into a new framework or language. I need to see practical examples. For…
And I need to see diagrams of mental models, though practical examples help solidify that. So one challenge with writing documentation is knowing what your audience needs. A better taxonomy of documentation would help solve this. For now, here is one I like based on https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/
- Tutorial: A walk through how to learn the basics as you build something.
- Explanation: Showing the mental model of something
- Guide: A walk through how to solve a specific problem
- Reference: A comprehensive* listing of the API capabilities and how they are used.
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If anyone knows of some good tutorials or explanations of mobile programming with React, I'd be grateful for recommendations.