My experience is different. The C/C++ (draft) standards documents are regular reference material for me, alongside web searches, man pages, & experimentation. (

My experience is different. The C/C++ (draft) standards documents are regular reference material for me, alongside web searches, man pages, & experimentation. (the draft standards are available for free in pdf format and for all practical purposes I've been able to treat them as the real thing) Experimentation is great for determining what the implementation you have right in front of you does, but not what is actually guaranteed. Trusted reference web pages are great (in fact, cppreference is AWESOME particularly for highlighting text that applies version-by-version of the C++ standard) but don't always cover everything. "I googled my error message" hits are so-so (but they may help you solve your problem) But the standard is the document that really lets you get into "how SHOULD it work", even while doing battle with 2 or 3 different compilers each of which implement a subset of the language you are theoretically programming in. (It's getting better, but finding a compatible subset of C++ supported by MSVC, gcc and clang used to be an interesting puzzle. And what a bummer to "switch to C++14" -- only with a list of caveats longer than most people will even read through, because of differential language & library support) I'd also just recommend becoming comfortable finding & extracting data from a daunting document like the C++ standard! It's a skill that will stand you in good stead, and I feel like being able to do this is one of the things that led to having my technical expertise well appreciated at work.