Sometimes, Googling can be a lot quicker than finding the answer in the documentation. Sometimes, the documentation does not exist. Sometimes, the documentation

Sometimes, Googling can be a lot quicker than finding the answer in the documentation. Sometimes, the documentation does not exist. Sometimes, the documentation is wrong and Googling finds a discussion that corrects it. Sometimes, you don't actually know what documentation to start with because a system is so new to you that you don't know what you need to know. When I answer questions on Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange, if the answer is in the documentation, I always try to link to it, while also providing a brief and clear explanation in the answer in case the documentation might be hard to interpret. I hope that helps with some of those people who don't know where to start in the documentation, or may have had trouble understanding it. For example, in this case, the documentation is hidden away in the kernel source tree. If you don't have a kernel source checkout, you may not have this documentation available on your system at all; and even if you did, you may not think to look there. This should be documented in a man page somewhere, but there's a long list of things that should be documented in man pages which are not: https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/missing_pages.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/missing_pages.html It is a good idea to learn how to find information in common documentation sources that are available on your system. One problem is that Google frequently winds up being a better answer than local documentation because it offers a single interface to find all kinds of documentation, rather than having to learn dozens of different interfaces and places to look, only some of which are easily searchable. Off the top of my head, here are a few places that I've needed to look for documentation recently: man pages, /usr/share/doc, kernel source, perldoc, pydoc, rdoc, info, Gnome Devel Docs, and so on. Gurus haven't always read more docs than you have. Sometimes they had to read the source. Sometimes they've just learned through trial and error, and reasoning about how stuff probably works. Sometimes they learned by word of mouth from someone else with experience. Reading the docs can definitely help; it can let you know about functionality that you've never thought to look for. But it's not the only tool for learning about a system, and how effective it is depends heavily on how thorough and good the documentation for the system is.