> I always thought that the Windows API help, especially those around Win3.1/95 had one of the better approaches for an API/library
You might be right but I don't remember being impressed with Microsoft's documentation. Half the time if was missing APIs for common useful tasks (there was a big community around demoing undocumented APIs -- granted some were genuinely only intended for internal use but there were some APIs that really should have been documented but weren't) and some of the example code Microsoft did publish was next to useless.
There was one occasion when I was teaching myself DDE (anyone else remember that?) and the example looked a bit weird because the example application would launch and call itself. "ok," I thought, "I'm obviously missing some logic when reading through. Maybe I should just run it to test it's behaviour." Five minutes later I was forced to reboot after my suspicions were confirmed -- their official DDE example was literally just a fork bomb. Well done Microsoft /s
However I did learn a valuable lesson that day: never trust example code.
I do not think they ever did a good job when it comes to examples, especially in the earlier days. Others like Borland were much better there.
But ever since 3.1 docs you could learn everything you wanted from the help file alone (3.0 help files were reference only) and i mainly refer to their structure. The content was sometimes a miss (though the worst i can remember is not being sure how region object lifetime was managed since unlike other GDI objects there wasn't any function to delete it).
You might be right but I don't remember being impressed with Microsoft's documentation. Half the time if was missing APIs for common useful tasks (there was a big community around demoing undocumented APIs -- granted some were genuinely only intended for internal use but there were some APIs that really should have been documented but weren't) and some of the example code Microsoft did publish was next to useless.
There was one occasion when I was teaching myself DDE (anyone else remember that?) and the example looked a bit weird because the example application would launch and call itself. "ok," I thought, "I'm obviously missing some logic when reading through. Maybe I should just run it to test it's behaviour." Five minutes later I was forced to reboot after my suspicions were confirmed -- their official DDE example was literally just a fork bomb. Well done Microsoft /s
However I did learn a valuable lesson that day: never trust example code.