I've always found the Phoenix docs to be more like references. There's "guide-like" aspects to it but in my opinion it's no where near the level of where the Rails docs are. I agree with the person we're replying to, I almost always found myself having to research third party sources when learning Phoenix (blog posts, IRC, etc.) to get answers to questions that I never had to ask about Rails, Flask or Django because their docs covered it very well.
The Rails doc feels like you have DHH at your side guiding you on exactly how to do something in the context of a practical application and whenever you think to yourself "that's great, but what if I want to do...", often times the very next sentence in the docs will answer your exact question.
The Rails routing docs https://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html are a great example of this when they talk about namespaces and scopes but there's a million other examples.
It feels like it was written by folks who have been through the thick of it and back 100 times over to extract out the exact questions folks would have when using various features of the framework. Each piece of the docs feels like it's a mini book written on par with any book on a technical subject and then there's a completely separate reference guide docs with more examples.
Even the styling of the page itself just feels good. It's really easy to skim and navigate. The Phoenix docs feel more like a big wall of text with a few small headers and code blocks. It's hard to explain but personally my brain identifies the Rails docs as easy to mentally parse where as the Phoenix docs are not based on nothing more than the styling aspect alone.
Overall the Rails docs feel like they are written with a ton of empathy around the person reading them, completely holding your hand from beginning to end to solve a practical issue which is exactly what you need when learning something new. The reference guides are always there if all you care about are a few quick examples.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m a big Rails fan as well. Been using it for a decade at this point. It’s the best development experience out there. But eventually, you’re going to run into issues that are harder to address with it. Happens on every big project I’ve run into.
But, they all became big projects thanks to the productivity of Rails.
