Using Oracle's Java Documentation as a Teaching Tool I'm in the process of preparing for the second semester of AP CS A (Java). I want to review objects and classes with my students to prepare for our extended focus this semester on inheritance and interfaces. I've been using textbooks I'm not particularly thrilled with, so I wanted to put together some review material of my own and/or from other sources.

My first Google took my right away to the official documentation from Oracle, and I found it to be a clean, easy-to-understand explanation of fundamental concepts of the language (which can't always be said for documentation). In particular, this section on Object-Oriented Programming Concepts is exactly what I was looking for in terms of simple, clear explanations with code samples. That lead me to ponder the following question...

What, if any, benefits are there for teaching straight from documentation rather than a textbook?
One obvious benefit, which is really a good goal in and of itself, is that students get used to utilizing documentation.  Many students don't use the internet as a resource at all, and those that do often wind up on StackOverflow.  It has been my experience that the very basic searches that those students often perform wind up at SO pages that are rather too complex.  If they want to know how to find a subset of a String in Java, the Oracle documentation is really a better place to begin than Google.

Being able to read and understand documentation gives them a powerful research tool that they can utilize for future explorations.