Why tutorials are just as important as documentation when it comes to coding

A couple of weeks ago I received some negative feedback from a piece that I had written. The post in question can be found here:- https://medium.com/geekculture/how-to-find-and-use-pythons-inbuilt-modules-and-the-functions-contained-in-them-5e1ba8a849e9

One commenter said to read the documentation and another commenter was just downright malicious. Nevertheless, I took the commenters’ comments on board and edited the post to reflect those changes.

I reflected on the commenter who said to read the documentation and came to the conclusion that he was only partly correct. Python is a very forgiving language and there are a number of ways that a person can code to achieve the same outcome. It is for this reason that the documentation is not always sufficient.

I have spent hours scouring over documentation for Python and its associated libraries. It is sad to say that sometimes the documentation does not always provide all of the answers to a programming query.

I am able to provide a number of queries to rationalise my ideas:-

One example that I can provide is with Python’s machine learning library, sklearn. In particular, I will focus on the OrdinalEncoder function.