When I say at a theoretical level I mean I’m familiar with it from University lectures and reading about what it is, but it is true I’ve never actually tweaked my networking in a practical sense enough to be familiar with it, which is exactly why I want to get into self-hosting.
As for the docs, I read them, I truly do. But docs are not where you find how to do something, is where you find how to implement it. By this I mean, if I wanna setup an authoritative DNS server, I need to find how I set one up. Once I know what software I need to use, I can read the docs to figure out how to wield said software. Just stuck on the step before being able to dive into the docs (or stuck on having too many docs to read, no middle ground)
Well, you’ve proven my point. In order to know how to setup an authoritative DNS server I need to read the docs for bind. But in order to know bind is the answer to my problem I need to read articles and blogs. There is no way to go from Authoritative DNS server to bind without reading some more on the internet in blogs and whatnot.
Once I know about bind, I can read it’s docs to set it up or to figure out if it’s the right thing for me, but I need to know about it first.
I only ever use something other than the docs when I’m either looking for something more specific than the docs, the docs suck or I can’t find it in the docs. Really not against reading through them at all.
But with a lot of programs that’s also an issue cause a lot of docs just expect you to be familiar with that area of knowledge (at least with some libraries I work with such as Spring in Java, which assumes constantly you know about HTTP and APIs when explaining how to set an HTTP API with Spring. Not saying it’s bad, you probably need that background knowledge anyway, and the doc writers cannot be bothered to bake it into the docs, but it gives people who are completely clueless like me more and more homework in a snowball that becomes quickly unmanageable)