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What experts? Do they sell their own course? Tutorials are great
Might be thinking of the danger of just doing tutorial after tutorial without learning.
https://www.wbscodingschool.com/blog/what-is-tutorial-hell-how-to-get-out/
Tutorials are great places to start, but you have to be really disciplined if you’re going to self-teach programming from online materials because you need to be responsible for making sure you go beyond a surface level understanding of the concepts and actually know how to employ them in practice to create new things. A lot of folks get stuck in what’s known as “tutorial hell” where they just keep on following different tutorials because it makes them feel like they’re doing something even though they’re just blindly following directions and not really learning anything.
It’s kind of like trying to learn a new language purely from doing duo lingo and never actually talking to anyone that speaks the language
I normally dont recommend tutorials to people with the exception if they REALLY dont know the language or are complete beginners in programming (not knowing for loops and stuff). Thats because I think most people learn faster building projects on their current skill level.
Tutorials are great to begin but at some point one has to stop relying on them. Many people spend more time in tutorials than they probably need to and that’s what experts usually warn against.
That doesn’t mean a complete beginner shouldn’t use tutorials but as a general rule of thumb, don’t use more than 1 tutorial for 1 concept before applying the concept (in a non tutorial project).
I think you need both things. Tutorials are an amazing way to get started, and serve as a good refresher. But, if you only rely on them. You won’t learn the bigger lessons that come from experience. Unfortunately that experience comes from trying and failing. Trying and failing is another skill that no tutorial teaches.
not sure, quality tutorials will have good coding examples to follow, there’s just so many ways to write good code and so many disciplines to follow for beginner … tutorials can be a good anchor, though its just the beginning only, very small part of the learning process, if u really follow through. If the teaching material is shallow, its better to just diverge ig. Anyway the litmus test, is if u can write code independantly, not just hundreds of lines but tens of thousands of lines of code … nothin else beats that
Learning through doing is generally preferable because it’s hard to get the context for what you’re being taught with tutorials.
When you learn by creating you go as far as you can, then when you reach a roadblock, you watch a tutorial or google something and you have a much better context for the thing you’re learning. This method of learning also sticks better in memory because you remember the reason why you had to look something up, what methods failed, and what solution ended up working etc.
Also, it’s unlikely that the tutorial will match exactly where you are in your learning journey. You might find a video that looks appealing, like watch a tutorial on “how to build a netflix clone” or something that incorporates a database and uses a framework like react, but you barely know HTML/CSS. Or the opposite, where half of the tutorial is reviewing something you’ve already learned
I’ll give you an example:
A beginner who knows nothing about programming and hasn’t touched JavaScript can follow a step-by-step tutorial on creating an app with React. By the end, they had a finished project and used a popular technology, but they hadn’t learned anything.
Guides, courses, documentation tech the intricacies of things, why they are like this, not just how to use them.
A tutorial is great for getting an idea of how to do it out of the box. You learn to set your environment and make a few basic programs. Unfortunately that’s all it does. I’m ok with them existing as long as people understand that’s all it does.
Tutorials are fine. It’s just that you need to be applying what you learn from each tutorial and try building something similar by yourself. If you’re just doing tutorial after tutorial, you’re not applying anything. A lot of people get stuck in “Tutorial hell” and never really learn anything.
Tutorial hellll
Tutorials are great bit they can’t teach you one essential skill.
That skill is how to solve problems where you have no idea how to solve them.
Programming basically is “doing easy stuff until you encounter a problem”
And solving this problem is the real skill, and this can’t be taught by anyone or problems. This is only gained by running into problems head first.
With time and experience you add old problems to your easy stuff list and get more efficient.
Let’s say you follow a tutorial to write a Fibonacci calculating function. Great you’ve got the working function, maybe you even took enough in to go write it again without following the tutorial
Now I want you to write a sorting algorithm function. Have you any clue how to do that from having followed the Fibonacci tutorial? Unlikely. So I guess you go watch another tutorial, now you know how to do two things
The problem with starting learning from tutorials is they don’t stretch you to develop the fundamental critical thinking and problem solving skills that are needed to tackle problems there aren’t tutorials for
Proper curriculums like CS50 or figuring out your own project gets you used to breaking down problems yourself, and from there you learn general skills that you can use on anything. Tutorials just give you step by step instructions on one particular thing, they don’t teach you how to think. It’s like the difference between someone who can follow IKEA instructions to assemble something, and someone who could actually engineer the item from scratch in the first place
Because people copy them character by character without learning the fundamental concepts
No worries if you learn and apply from tuts tho
Tutorials are good, but you need to get away from tutorials as soon as you possibly can.
Don’t know how to do something? Use a tutorial. Once you know how to do that thing? Don’t look at a tutorial for it again, unless you absolutely need to. This will force you to actually learn how and why said thing works.
Consider building a lego Death Star. With the manual, you could put it all together correctly. Now if you take it apart again, and burn the manual, would you be able to put it together correctly? Probably not. You might have extra pieces, you might have not enough pieces, you might have pieces in the wrong spot, and you’ll most likely just end up at a point where you’re a bit confused on where to proceed. At this stage you just need to TRY things, and use documentation, problem solving skills, and the knowledge you gleaned from the tutorial to actually build it on your own.
If you just use a tutorial every time you need to build something, you’re gonne just end up using tutorial after tutorial, and then when someone asks you “hey, can you make me a REST API?” your answer is going to be no, because you don’t actually know how to build one- you just know how to follow a tutorial to build one.
Using a tutorial is a good way to go from knowing nothing about a programming language or framework to a beginner level. After that it’s best to continue learning from building projects, playing with code, and reading the official documentation.
the problem isn’t the tutorials, but tutorial hell
they’ll tell you to read documentation because they’re experts lol. definitely start with tutorials. the down side with this is something called tutorial hell. a stage most beginners fall into where they never stop watching tutorials and actually start building their own projects to apply what they’ve learned.
Beginners who just do tutorial projects don’t learn anything and can’t work on a new project by themselves. It also serves no value because everyone has the same set of problems. Like everyone has that calculator app that they followed a tutorial for so what makes you different? Also just watching tutorial after tutorial might feel productive but you aren’t learning at all.
Language tutorials are fine. Looking up a tutorial on how to use a for loop or something is fine because then you need to know how to use a for loop to apply it in a project. It’s just getting stuck watching big project tutorials that’s a problem.
Tough question, OP.
In my experience I have never recommended that somebody NOT use a tutorial.
However, I have said many times that people should code a lot on their own to help learn new concepts. Reading lessons or following along on tutorials isn’t neat enough.
My suggestion is a pretty common one. You might be conflating “do code” with “don’t do a tutorial”?
With the state of tutorial sites today, I’d say they’re a far less useful resource than they once were. Most of them have become riddled with ads, and trying to provide you the lowest quality information possible with the highest profit on those ads. Clickbait, etc.
I highly recommend starting the old fashioned way. Buy a beginners book on your language of choice, one on data structures / algorithms, and one on web apps. You learn a lot of additional little details you won’t find in tutorials, or video sites like udemy. That edge can get you ahead in interviews or your own personal pursuits.
Tutorials are like a training wheel for your bike. They are great if you are in the very beginning state and can’t even balance yourself, but you can’t rely on them if you wanna go faster and further.
A tutorial will guide you through the basics, but often you will need to read the documentation or even read the source code of a library to get a good understanding and achieve more complex/specific use-cases.
Mostly because tutorials tell you *what* to do, but not why. Often, by the time you finish a tutorial, you have no idea what you did or why it works (or why it didn’t work). Now, we’re talking about the kind of tutorials that “build an app”.
They want to have you get to a working product as quickly as possible because explaining all the boilerplate needed to get the app running is time-consuming. You want to ask why, but to explain why the thing works would take 3-5 times as long.
It’s like learning a few phrases to go to a foreign country instead of learning the grammar. You learn the phrases because you don’t have time to learn a huge vocabulary, and you can get by using poor grammar because humans can often piece together what you’re trying to ask.
Also, it’s like following a recipe if you never knew how to cook. Most people who learn to cook have seen someone cook whether it’s their parents or a sibling or a YouTube video. But if you never learned anything about cooking, then using a knife is something new. The vegetables and meats and spices are all new, so you need time to learn all of that.
Indeed, if you go to culinary school, they don’t teach recipes. They teach the principles behind recipes, how to balance out a rich dish with acid (e.g., lemon juice), how to use salt, butter, chilis, etc. They talk about mother sauces, ways to break down chicken, to cut up vegetables. It’s very much learning technique first.
Tutorials are basically like following recipes which work fine for home chefs, but aren’t great for programmers because changing the “recipe” (code, in this case) is much tougher than changing ingredients in a recipe.
Many beginners complain they really can’t write an app from scratch (not that experienced programmers do that either, as they can rely on a template to follow instead of memorizing every last detail).
Tutorials are not that bad, but don’t become addicted.
As soon as you ‘get the gist’ then you should go back to basics and make all the mistakes the tutorials never mention! THAT is WHEN you LEARN… when you start swearing and cursing, that’s a learning opportunity at work!
Tutorials are fine, but they are like training wheels. If you want to learn how to bike, you need to take them off