I'm not trolling. From my perspective mastering a language includes mastering its included library (for things like python where its standard library is indeed what everyone is using). Thus, it is always preferable to read the complete documentation for some functionality and pick up every detail along the way instead of having an idea in your head how to do the thing you want and picking only the exact use case you wanted from an example.
> If I need to know exactly how all the options work, sure the docs are the place to go, but 90% of the time I just need a quick example to go off of.
You will almost never get to the point where you'd need to know "exactly how all the options work" because if your routine is "search example, copy example, continue", you won't even know what options exist and that there is a way you could do things different (maybe more efficient? simpler?).
Agreed. For all of the hate PHP gets, the state of their respective docs was a big pain point for me in trying to learn Python after years of writing PHP.
However, the PHP docs, especially for older, less-used functions, are riddled with subtle errors and inconsistencies related to the typing of arguments and handling of edge cases. But the way they're structured is fine! I particularly enjoy how you can type php.net/sprintf and land directly on the doc page you're looking for.
> If I need to know exactly how all the options work, sure the docs are the place to go, but 90% of the time I just need a quick example to go off of.
You will almost never get to the point where you'd need to know "exactly how all the options work" because if your routine is "search example, copy example, continue", you won't even know what options exist and that there is a way you could do things different (maybe more efficient? simpler?).