192939495969798999's Journal: What happened to programming manuals?

Here's a test to see how bad documentation has become. Grab the doc from the software company that wrote your favorite app/language/etc. and tell me:
what a sample call looks like in context (i.e. a multi-line source snippet)?
what types of parameters I can call it with? Do we know the base classes, etc.?
what happens when I call it with a NULL parameter? Error messages that may eminate and why?
If there is a question as to what kind of information should be provided
in the documentation, refer to user/programming manuals from a
few years back. They used to have all this information in them; in fact,
you could practically learn the product from scratch using the manual.
Now I have to go buy 5-10 third-party books and even then I don't get the
whole picture. A single, modest-sized programming manual can cover every
example needed for a day-to-day development reference. Developers
shouldn't have to spend hours doing research and support just to find out
how any given function of the product is supposed to work, don't you
agree? I don't think an experienced developer should need to memorize
everything from a $3000 class (because there's no written manual anywhere)
in order to navigate the app either. Any software is only as
useful as its manuals allow it to be.