1) First hand, official documentation is the only one that matters. No blog posts. Some projects have very bad, or inexistent documentation, but those are probably not worth using anyway. I have found software and documentation quality to be very strongly correlated.
2) If you want to participate, or you have a deep problem that can't be solved by reading the documentation, mailing lists are the way to go. Web forums, stackoverflow and similar things are an awful waste of time. Do your homework before posting to a mailing list. If you send HTML emails and/or you don't fmt(1) or par(1) your email, you will be ignored.
3) IRC is great for social interaction. Sometimes you'll solve a minor problem on IRC, but that's not what it's for. You can learn a lot on IRC just by listening to other people talk about technology.
1) First hand, official documentation is the only one that matters. No blog posts. Some projects have very bad, or inexistent documentation, but those are probably not worth using anyway. I have found software and documentation quality to be very strongly correlated.
2) If you want to participate, or you have a deep problem that can't be solved by reading the documentation, mailing lists are the way to go. Web forums, stackoverflow and similar things are an awful waste of time. Do your homework before posting to a mailing list. If you send HTML emails and/or you don't fmt(1) or par(1) your email, you will be ignored.
3) IRC is great for social interaction. Sometimes you'll solve a minor problem on IRC, but that's not what it's for. You can learn a lot on IRC just by listening to other people talk about technology.