Reading Documentation

This is documentation for reading JavaScript documentation generated by documentation.js

How do you read API documentation?

Compared to answers, examples, or narrative documentation, API documentation can be an intimidating read: it's much more like an Encylopedia than a novel.

Understanding the types of things

API documentation will have a few explicit classes of things that are documented. Here are some distinctions that aren't always laid out in other kinds of documentation:

• instance methods will usually be denoted with the # symbol in API documentation. These are methods that you call on an instance of an object. For instance, in native JavaScript, strings have a .toUpperCase() method. You don't call this method on the String type, but you call it on a specific string: like you can write var yelling = 'hi'.toUpperCase() Remember that, though documentation uses the # character to show what's an instance method, you don't actually use that symbol in your source code.
• static methods instead are called on objects or classes without needing to instantiate anything. Usually in documentation, static methods are denoated with a '.' The fromCharCode method of strings is an example of this: it'll be documented as a static method and called like String.fromCharCode(20). Notice that we're not calling this on a specific string, but the String class itself.