A Product is as good as it's Documentation & Community Support

I feel, the success of any product relies heavily on the documentation available for it & it's helpfulness to developers. If there is an active community around it that collaborates through Forums, it can boost the confidence of neophytes working with it & take the product to greater heights. Sometimes the documentation contributed by community members is more effective than the original documentation which is generally provided as a formality & cloaked in jargon. The following are some examples of independent contributions that I have benefited from -

• Mikesdotnetting's multi-part series on ITextSharp. The open-source PDF library creator Bruno's documentation is good as well.
• Kevin Gao's Visual SourceSafe (VSS) Tutorial
• The "An Extensive Examination of .." series on various .NET topics by Scott Mitchell
• Dave Wanta's very comprehensive FAQs on the System.Web.Mail & System.Net.Mail namespaces related to emailing

(to be continued...)

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