Not to be defensive, but unfortunately we have a huge mountain of docs that were traditionally written by the programmers, and a shockingly small team trying to keep them up-to-date. If you look at some newer documentation, you can at least see where we're trying to get to:
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/polybridge.html [
sidefx.com]
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/boolean.html [
sidefx.com]
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/polyextrude.html [
sidefx.com]
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/polybevel.html [
sidefx.com]
Besides (or because of) being complex, we don't really have the wide variety of 3rd-party websites that explain things in different ways and make lots of videos, like Maya and Max do. Houdini hasn't been mainstream/required in the industry for all that long (I remember the time when no-one had even heard of it). Hopefully that will slowly improve.
Terminology is a definite problem. Houdini can be set in its ways, and programmers like to call the same thing by three different names. Whenever we have a chance to redo things, I take the opportunity to try to pull us toward mainstream conventions and more consistency.
Regarding C4D's docs, I took a quick look at
https://help.maxon.net/#1001 [
help.maxon.net] and I gotta be honest, it looks just as bad as Houdini's docs to me. Is there a section that's particularly good I should look at, or a different set of docs somewhere else that I missed?
Thanks for all the feedback so far! Houdini's bread-and-butter is technical improvements and new features, but behind the scenes a lot of us are working long-term on making it easier to use and improving the documentation and tutorials. This feedback helps us out a lot.
Matt