That's more or less exactly how I learned to program. From books, with a few friends. Only after it got to a certain level and I started frequenting more places where we met other people working with computers some of which were professional programmers.

I still have some of them. They've aged surprisingly well.

> That's more or less exactly how I learned to program. From books

What kind of books? The person you're replying to is arguing in favor of books, but saying that the documentation in particular is not a good one to start with.

I think you are assuming disagreement where there is none.

I wasn't assuming it, but I felt like directly asking wouldn't make my comment any clearer.

The problem is "That's more or less exactly how I learned to program." sounds like it's a response to the question in the comment you replied to. Which would mean there's either disagreement or you didn't understand the question. And the way you mentioned other people sounded like you might be interpreting "guide" as a human guide.

I guess instead you were skipping the question and talking about the second sentence?

In that case I recommend quoting which sentence you're replying to in a situation like this.

I did. On Windows, Python had (still have?) a good offline help. And it included a nice getting started tutorial. The only book I had was “The C Programming Language”. But they ignited my interest enough to start researching, and I landed on the "Site du Zero" (now OpenClassrooms) platform. The web was sparser, but better, in these days (2010).