I am at a high-beginner/low-intermediate level in Python, and one thing that drives me nuts is how poorly I am able to read the Python official documentation and grok how to use the described code.

What's the secret? Are there any guides/videos/books that can help my understand how to approach reading it? Or, is it just one of those things that I need to just keep coming back to while coding, and eventually I will get the hang of it?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I highly recommend visiting the Python discord (https://discord.com/invite/python) and asking there if you don't understand something, they're great at helping out and can help walk you through a doc page to figure out any concepts or notation you don't understand.

Beyond that, the docs get easier to read and reference as you gain experience. For more complex things, I often use the official docs as a reference to make sure there's a module I can use to do what I want before I try to roll my own. Then I tend to look up examples elsewhere (often realpython and SO). Do you have an example of something you're struggling with?

Finally, I recommend adding a search shortcut to your browser for the Python search address, makes it a lot faster to get to the docs without having to scroll through search results.