Saved by the blog

I just passed a milestone: I just had my first experience where I desperately needed an answer and search pointed me right to a blog entry that immediately answered it. In my case, I needed to know the amd64 calling convention, and MSN search pointed me to an excellent blog post by Raymond Chen that described exactly what I needed to know, and did so in a very concise clear way. It's such a wonderful feeling when you can get an answer like that so quickly and it turns out to be so simple.

In one sense, I actually prefer blogs (from reputable sources, of course) to official references. Whereas technical references may have a lot more jargon, may even be wrong or out of date, and rarely emphasize the danger cases in an intuitive way. I find the good blogs are accurate and not only present the information, but focus on the key issues and explicitly call out gotchas. It's the best of both worlds when the blog actually links to the technical reference, just in case you want to double check the facts.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 19, 2006
  I've found that blogs are one of my primary development resources.
  
  The good ones really call out the information that you need to get started, where to go for more information, and as you said above, all of the "gotchas".
  
  Case in point (flattery): This blog was one of the best resources I found anywhere (along with the Mdbg source) for learning how to implement a managed debugger.
  
  There is definitely something good to be said for a good blogger who often is probably a developer who has the attitude that what he's writing will help others like him who are "in the trenches" to get stuff done.
• Anonymous
  June 19, 2006
  Jonah - I'm thrilled that my blog can be useful for a particular nitch. How's KPL coming anyways?