First Officer, a very good question. I converted to the Airbus A340 back in the earlyish ‘90s. I came from ahem, traditional Boeing types. Essentially I and my colleagues leapt several decades from analogue Boeing technology into the starry and digital future Airbus world. In a way it was less traumatic than you might think in that the only similarities were provided by Isaac Newton in the guise of gravity and physics. In terms of the documentation we were disappointed to discover that they were fairly unreadable in that they were a gibberish form of franglais that could be incomprehensible, pilot or engineer. I had a brief reacqaintance with the Largest Airbus in a bizarre interlude as an instructor with EK. The FCOM had not improved in the intervening years. My views about how pilots interact with Airbus are the following: some pilots and instructors attempt to baffle with pseudo science, pontificating about Control Laws etc without really understanding. Airbus do not want you to have too deep an understanding as we were told essentially to just press the expletive deleted buttons and if something goes wrong just follow the ECAM. You could say a form of corporate arrogance generally not replicated in Boeing world. As others have said I would stick with the original suite of manuals and avoid the unsupervised Airbus for Dummies which are not always technically correct. Also any ambiguities ask the friendliest instructor in your airline for technical clarification. Finally, although you are very self deprecatory about your engineering background, you do write very well so I doubt whether the answer is A.