> Don’t Guess
I find that, when working with a new "thing," I often like to guess for about an hour or so before I really do a deep dive into the reference. Or, I'll read a stackoverflow answer or two, play around with it, and then go to reference.
Why?
Often there's a lot of context in the reference that only makes sense once I've had some hands-on time with whatever the reference is describing.
This is especially the case when learning a new language or API: I'll go through a tutorial / quickstart; "guess" at making a change; and then go back and read the reference with a better understanding of the context.
BTW: This is why I like languages and IDEs that support things like intellisense. It's great to be able to see little bits of documentation show up in my IDE to help me in my "guess" stage of learning.