How do you decide which API function documentations to read and how seriously?

Posted by Uri on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Uri
Published on 2008-10-01T22:37:11Z Indexed on 2010/04/01 1:53 UTC
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Suppose that you are writing or maintaining a piece of code that uses some API that you are not 100% familiar with.

How do you decide whether to read the documentation of a certain call target, and how much time to spend reading it? How do you decide not to read it?

(Let's assume you can read it by opening the HTML documentation, inspecting the source code, or using the hover mechanism in the IDE).

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