One of the best habits you can form as a developer is to read documentation daily. Not because you've hit an iceberg and are googling for a solution, but simply to become a more informed developer. Whether you're learning new languages, discovering new features on the latest release, or brushing up on that framework you've been using for years, reading for just 10-15 minutes per day is going change your game.

Here are 3 things you'll notice as you use this technique.

Use the Whole Buffalo

Are you sure you need to add another dependency?

If I had a penny for every time I've seen a developer use a 3rd-party library when a native solution exists... The most obvious example of this is the geeky practical joke, Vanilla JS, the satirical 'lightweight framework' which is actually just an attempt to spread awareness that JavaScript can handle many of the tasks for which people add more dependencies.

When you spend more time reading the docs, you get more mileage out of your languages, frameworks, and libraries. You discover how to use the tools already in your belt rather than searching for new ones. Not only do you build leaner applications with less bloat, but you code faster because you're more familiar with the capabilities of your tools.

If the language has it, use it.

Better Code

With very few exceptions, you'll find that the finest specimens of code are typically composed by the people who build libraries and frameworks. Take for instance, jQuery. The source code of jQuery is pure artistry. Even though modern frameworks like React and Angular have made it obsolete, it still remains a great case study for how to code well.

And the same is true of underscore and lodash. Now I recognize that there's a difference between source code and documentation, but my point is this. People who write code of this calibre, write good docs. And good docs often have the best examples for how to use the code... which leads to my next point.

Docs > Tuts

Are you the type of person who looks for a tutorial when you get in over your head? If so, you might be wasting time that could be saved by reading the docs.

Tutorials can be good, but they're no substitute for good documentation. You can waste a lot of time following a tutorial, only to find out that it's using a deprecated method or an outdated version. Or perhaps the code snippet is just plain wrong and has never been tested. It's so much better to rely on official sources.