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It seems to be the general rule of thumb that, when you want to google for an oracle error message, then exclusion of both oracle documentation site, and devel
by vjust 5y ago
It seems to be the general rule of thumb that, when you want to google for an oracle error message, then exclusion of both oracle documentation site, and developer forums is your first criteria on the search bar. Same applies to Microsoft (large parts of MSDN), and now Amazon Web Services documentation (at least some parts of it).
That's the reason StackOverflow works - it really solves programmer's problems, instead of the strange dialects of English and style that flourish on MS and Oracle and Java docs.
- NeutralForest 5y agoI can't agree with the Java one, there are great examples and docs out there.
- lubonay 5y agoWell, he said Java for Android. The Android SDK is a capricious beast and the documentation is often outdated or sub-par.
- Rd6n6 5y agoThe aws docs aren’t concise, but they have a lot of good information in them if you want to go in depth. I learned a lot back when I was an intern by reading them Iirc, the postgres docs were also good reading in a similar way: not concise, but a lot of good information
- zaat 5y agoIn my experience both Oracle and Microsoft documentation is usually good to excellent,I actually want google to search specifically on ms docs site most of the time. I do find AWS docs to be lengthy and incomprehensible. StackOverflow is mostly useful to quickly (and often dirtly) solve issues that are burning now, without getting deeper understanding of the subject. This isn't universally true, some answers are exceptionally good.
- cyberbanjo 5y agoSomewhat unrelated, the case where I want to "Google search some specific site" is well suited to duckduckgo bangs, if there is a bang for that site. !msdn will search MS's developer network
- zaat 5y agoJust like site:msdn.microsoft.com, just more convenient and with worse results
- rtkaratekid 5y agoI’m currently taking my first foray into the world of MS applications for work. Have to write something that interacts with an EWS server and I’ve been… overwhelmed with not only the disorganization of their docs, but also the super strong push to do everything in C# instead of just telling me which SOAP (yes that soap) parameters/documents to use for certain actions. If anyone here wants to defend MS and tell me I’m horribly wrong and point me to some fantastic docs somewhere I would be so delighted to be proven wrong.
- pjungwir 5y agoYes, pretty much everything is like that: explained in terms of their web services wrapper, not the actual messages sent on the wire. And if you want to log the SOAP messages going back & forth, you have to implement a weird listener class to get them. Microsoft came late to TCP/IP and the web because of their contempt for open, text-based network protocols, and you can still sense it in their products. For instance the C# web client is able to upload mime-encoded files, but the form data name must be `file`. It can't be `photo`. Let alone `photo1` in the same request as `photo2` or a bunch of photos named `user[photos][]`. And you should try reading the Stack Overflow answers for making Powershell print a raw HTTP conversation the way `curl -v` can. On the other hand, if you do understand the underlying network protocols and can read them (and find ways to view what is happening), it is like a super power.
- torginus 5y agoI'm not sure why the hate against MSDN - at least for .NET, I found the documentation to be one of the best in the business -even a decade ago. I'd only put Go's docs ahead in terms of helpfulness. I cut my teeth writing .NET code, then switched to Java writing apps on Android - the step down in doc quality was quite significant.
- HideousKojima 5y agoMSDN isn't terrible, but for answers.microsoft.com 90% of questions are some outsourced foreign support rep telling the user to run sfc /scannow and not looking into the issue any further. Which makes it a huge pain for sysadmin type stuff, their developer documentation is much better.
- zaat 5y agoanswers.microsoft.com accepted answers are mostly accepted by the poor foreign support rep after OP have left disappointed. It is somewhat similar in quality to yahoo answers. Microsoft should be ashamed this pile of useless bits is public.
- aksss 5y agoLet me make sure I understand the problem you're having trouble getting answers from answers.microsoft.com, is that correct? Please open the site answers.microsoft.com in Microsoft Edge web browser and once the page loads, look for answers there. This should solve the issue. Can you also please run the windows memory diagnostic tool and paste in the output in a reply to this message? Once you have done that, please open your computer and make sure that your CPU is firmly seated in its socket. That will be required to help further. If this has helped solve the problem finding answers on answers.microsoft.com please mark it as correct.
- tdeck 5y agoThis is excellent and very representative.
- throwaway675309 5y agoHonestly I wouldn't mind the MSDN documentation so much or the Microsoft forums if it didn't feel like it was constantly doing this super tedious redirection hot potato because of their SSO Microsoft live account bull crap.
- tialaramex 5y agoSo spoiled by Rust now when using one of these "documented" APIs. * Rust's examples work, because the default behaviour of Rust's automated testing is to test your documented examples (as well as any unit tests you wrote), so, it's actually more effort to write examples that don't work. If you're too lazy for that, you're going to not write any examples, so then I at least know I'm in uncharted territory. * The relevant Rust source code is linked. Mostly. Rust's source links don't chase macros, so it's conceivable your link tells you that foo(X) is just the result of the macro make_thing!(foo,X) and you need to chase how make_thing!() is defined which is annoying. But 99% of the time you discover immediately what's actually going on. This week I would say about half of my time was spent fighting with the C# library for talking to the Microsoft Graph API. Both of which are, in theory, "documented" and yet I repeatedly ended up cribbing from Stack Overflow answers or, after beating my head against a wall, pasting URLs (which I already know will go stale in a year or two) and Microsoft's uselessly bland explanations for the obviously broken stuff as the excuse for why we can't do things you would obviously anticipate being possible. Today I particularly liked: There are five documented ways to make an educationClass. Most of them simply don't work (unanswered Issues on github), and the error responses for these methods are undocumented and lead nowhere. But one of them does work. However the C# library drops the output of the API call for that method on the floor, presumably because coping with this case was hard, and so the best option (as a Stackoverflow post explains) is to reach inside the library, dredge out the HTTP request it's about to do, and perform that request yourself, then do all the heavy lifting they couldn't be bothered to do with the HTTP response to get what you actually wanted (including a polling loop because apparently nothing after the 1980s happened for Microsoft). However, in the months since that Stackoverflow post was written, the C# library API has changed, enough that the example code wouldn't even build. The change is undocumented (of course) and involves an enumeration (also undocumented) which was auto-generated for some reason. This feels like somebody was hoping it wouldn't matter if they changed it, and that somebody was wrong. But if they'd been forced to document it then maybe they'd have either decided it wasn't worth it (still works as before) or I'd have saved ten minutes guessing how the API now works. But now it's the weekend and I'm going to write Rust.
- Zababa 5y agoA thing that helps with Rust, in my opinion, is that the language is statically typed and people mostly write functions. That makes it easy to glue the pieces together in my head. So even if the documentation isn't great, I can find a way to do what I want.
- punnerud 5y agoA lot of the good errors is gone when you switch from (Oracle) SQL Developer to DataGrip. So many reasons to use DataGrip, but often enough (>once a month) I have to fire up SQL Developer to get line number errors.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoI think the problem stems from 2 major parts. A lot of times the people writing the code & designing the APIs for the complex parts of AWS, Java, .NET, Spanner, etc... are highly-technical and not exactly highly articulate. And even the ones that are highly articulate usually have trouble figuring out who exactly their audience is and what their audience knows and to what degree they need to explain things. And even the select few programmers who are good at this, run into another set of problems. The language they use amongst themselves is usually highly technical (because it reduces confusion and speeds up communication). However, many of the readers of the documentation aren't going to understand a lot of these terms or concepts. The language needs dumbed down. Because this is time consuming and requires a lot of thought - the documentation is usually written by technical writers. While these people are usually good at figuring out the audience and how best to communicate with the audience - they have their own unique way of writing (for clarity) that usually causes the documentation they produce to feel non-concise and sometimes not even clear. I think a good example of this is the Apigee documentation: https://cloud.google.com/apigee https://cloud.google.com/apigee After reading the page - I only have the vaguest idea of what it actually does and I have almost no idea when I should use it and when I shouldn't or how it actually works (which, tbf, probably isn't important at this stage).
- FpUser 5y agoWin32 along with DirectX, Media Framworks etc. etc has one of the best docs and examples ever from my experience.
- justplay 5y agoalso applies to salesforce.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]