> Nowadays developers seem to code without reading. As someone who started programming 4 year back (which from the conversation seems to be pretty much "nowada

> Nowadays developers seem to code without reading. As someone who started programming 4 year back (which from the conversation seems to be pretty much "nowadays" :-)), I think it is a bit of a generalization. I am not saying it's not true. There are certainly places such as StackOverflow, mailing lists etc that attract newbies early on because they provide quick answers or even code, but at some point every developer who is serious about computer programming as a long term profession does need to start reading the docs. There is no other alternative and one eventually comes to realize that it's much faster than arbitrarily hunting for code and asking questions on mailing lists and IRC. It also depends upon the style of programming language (imperative/functional) and the previous experience of the developer IMO. For eg. I find my self reading the docs significantly more in Erlang/Scala than in Python than in PHP/JS. It is also the reverse order in which I learnt these languages. Of course that is my personal experience.