Documentation comes in two halves, the examples and the reference, the examples are nice to understand how everything ties together, the reference explain how things work. If I only had one I would pick the reference. But having said that there have been times I would have killed for a simple example.
When I am learning something, I do tend to start with the examples, it is the best way to quickly get a feel for the shape of the domain and it's usage. But then end up in the reference in order to understand and apply what I just learned.