Previously, when I was looking for quick information concerning syntax or other SQL Server details, I avoided the Microsoft SQL Server online documentation. Why? Because it was far too difficult to extract the information you needed from the gobs and gobs of text, with every possible variation of every single parameter.
Check out this page from the SQL Server 2008 official documentation, and see how long it takes you to get a quick example of how to to create a unique constraint on a table.
Did you notice that there's 764 lines on the page? And all the examples are at the bottom. The specific example I was looking for was on line 508, in a list of 14 examples.
That's why I usually went straight to the third party sites such as StackOverflow and w3schools. They have single topic short pages, with examples front and center - you can get what you need in a few seconds.
But I was recently reviewing the online documentation, specifically for SQL Server 2014, and it's improved tremendously. Take a look at this page, on creating a check constraint. It's short, to the point, and the examples are not difficult to find. Honestly, I'd still go to the third party sites before I'd go to the official documentation, just because they're still more concise and to-the-point. But now the official documentation at least has a chance.
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EDIT 11/11/2014
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So, Microsoft documentation has been slowly improving, which is great. But I've recently been playing with Redshift, the Amazon AWS data warehouse product. Now there's some well done documentation. I had been reading up on a new feature that they had - IF NOT EXISTS for table creation and dropping. Since I was working through getting a Redshift cluster set up, I decided to try the new feature, looking at this page of the documentation.
But the feature didn't work. Since every page of the online documentation has a Feedback button, I sent some feedback saying that the feature didn't work. Within 2 hours, I got a friendly email back, saying that I had discovered an "undocumented feature", and that they were working on fixing it. Wow! Very impressive.
