> On the flip side, Spring's documentation (and most Java library documentation) is absolutely atrocious. Spring in particular only seems to give you 2 flavors

> On the flip side, Spring's documentation (and most Java library documentation) is absolutely atrocious. Spring in particular only seems to give you 2 flavors of documentation: a 10-minute tutorial, or a 1000-page deep dive in all of the corners of the framework. And Java libraries in general seem to have miserable, out-of-date, incomplete documentation. I actually find the opposite with Java libraries. They are generally over documented but are complete. The issue is that many have issues with publishing doc/Javadoc (with github it is slightly non trivial) and thus are outdated. Java projects have also been around a lot longer so some of them use archaic doc formats like docbook (spring). However the biggest problem with Java documentation is the accessibility of the standard language + javax stuff (ie jdk + jee). IMO Oracle does a piss poor job of this. You have to register and it is either in some messed up help tree format or some PDF that is impossible to download. On the other hand Apache and Spring I think are far far far more detailed in documentation than your standard PHP, Ruby, Python projects. The documentation may not be as pretty but it is there. I stress that because many languages and libraries lack specifications or review processes (even still) and Java was doing it fairly early (albeit with various corporate agendas).