Hey guys,
I have read many posts that discourage watching tutorials. I do understand the tutorial loop thing.
But sometimes it's just difficult to start when you have no idea. And tutorial does help at that point.
How do you strike the balance? When do you know it's time to let go?
I started a react project after watching few tutorials. While making some progress, I really didn't know how to proceed. And now going through some tutorials again.
I would love to hear your experience. How did you let go or knew that this is it?
Top comments (8)
I bought a book about Haskell and read half of it (I'm a web developer who do most of the time imperative/object-oriented programing). I stopped because I started to feel that I was just reading and not really learning things because I accumulated lots of questioning and had trouble testing it since I also did not understood some core concepts about the language. So I stopped and began watching some YouTube videos about it until I can say
oooooooooooh I see now. And yeah that's when I started reading the book again and really enjoyed the language itself. I feel like it is just me but I know some people have trouble to start learning something just by reading the specification or an official documentation. I also did a lot of challenges with sites like Hacker rank or Codewars. I'm not ashamed at saying that at first, I was just failing while when using JavaScript, I could fail because I just could not find an algorithm to find the solution. In Haskell, I mostly failed because I didn't know what I could be able to do in order to solve the problem. Here again, tutorials on YouTube helped me a lot.Many developers claim that you can get stuck in a loop. Which I agree, but I personally tried working on a project by going through minimal amount of tutorial.
I got stuck and now back to tutorial to get unstick.
It's hard to figure out the optimal amount to be honest.
I think it is all about learning style. I think you make a very good point about finding something difficult to start and I think tutorials or small apps help get you from 0 to something. And if you still don't know where to go from there, you find another one.
Not everyone can just dive into a new framework without help.
I was feeling quite discouraged after reading those articles. According to them I was suppose to just jump to projects but I was just lost.
I guess it's more about trial and error.
I think the idea that tutorials are 100% bad for you is wrong, but I also think learning everything you need from tutorials is also wrong.
One of the first steps in learning anything, is knowing what you don't know. For example, you can't learn X if you don't even know what X is. This is where tutorials are nice, as they provide a quick skim over the what and the why so you can determine if you actually need to learn it, and roughly what you should already know. This idea goes deeper than just learning technologies, concepts within what your learning are the same, in that if you didn't know about React's new Hooks api, then how could you possible go out and learn it? (this is just an example 😉)
The second step is getting experience with X, this is where tutorials aren't very helpful. The quickest way to learn something is to use it, fail with it, and overcome the common issues. You don't get that by following along with tutorials.
I don't think I've seen anyone here discourage watching tutorials.
Not necessarily directly. But there is a concept of tutorial limbo.
It's true that one can get stuck in the limbo.
I wouldn't worry about it. If tutorials work better for you than documentation, go for it. I use both.