Turbo Pascal came with reference manuals, but also with instructional books that taught you OO programming and Windows UI programming from scratch.
They must have been well-written; I didn't really have Internet access, so there was nowhere else to go if I got stuck. Though I was probably a much more determined learner back then.
So much this. It ties in with my other comment, to some degree.
Someone here mentioned StackOverflow, but really, a handful of manuals, maybe a good book or two, and some persistence, /usually/ gave you all you needed to figure out a problem, and do something magical.
Now, those resources (if they're available) will likely only help you understand a very small subsystem.
I appreciated that the behavior of that system was fixed for a certain period of time. That word processor would work the same for all eternity (warts and all) if you didn’t intentionally get a version upgrade.
IBM mainframe documentation was amazing. I encountered cases of strange edge conditions that would be carefully detailed in some manual even though any given installation would be unlikely to encounter it. (The trick would be finding that given manual, so having your library properly organized helped.)
