I think one should consider that there are 3 distinctive source of help/information serving somewhat different but overlapping goals:
1) Comprehensive books on the subject - especially useful when learning new technology from scratch to get a general overview of the whole environment/functionality/language/tools and how all pieces work together to create real life application. They often contain fairly comprehensive API description overlapping with:
2) Official online documentation (MSDN and alike) - complete API/technology reference with some of how-tos
3) Crowd sources - MSDN forum, Stack Overflow and other forums. Mostly geared towards giving answers to specific real-world question that cannot be answered by 1) and 2). Extremely useful because nobody can predict all possible real life scenarios and this is where the strength of the crowd knowledge really shines through because more often then not - whatever you problem is there is a good chance someone already experienced it and possibly found solution.