You don't need a tutorial for every-freaking-thing | Hacker News Reader

You don't need a tutorial for every-freaking-thing

goshakkk.name

40 pointsswah20 comments

A lot of negativity for this article, but it addresses something I often see in those just starting out: searching for help in an overly specific way.

You'll find people asking: "How do I create on online store for my candle making shop?" and you'll point them to a tutorial that happens to use a shoe shop as an example and they'll think it doesn't apply to their situation.

The article's advocating for people to use tutorials as a jumping off point, to ask more specific questions and to reason through what does and doesn't apply to their situation.

Also, fwiw - hats off to the many, many tutorial writers whose articles have helped me over the years.

One of the most valuable skills I always try to teach junior (and sometimes not so junior) developers is not only how to abstract your problems (as the author points out in this article), but also how to follow a related chain. For instance, let's say you have an issue with some event not firing in an old browser, and as you research it, you see the same answers saying a concept you haven't heard of before. Looking that concept up (and either reading about it or following some tutorial) then teaches a wider understanding in that domain, instead of a bandaid fix that the developer doesn't understand but fixes the problem now.

The role of a developer isn't just about solving problems, but to understand why the solution works as well.

I generally agree with this. Tutorials are most useful when they illustrate the building blocks for larger problems, and when they explain the why along with the how.

With a little practice, you learn how to dismantle a problem, recognize the elements that make it up, and pattern-match the portions of other problems that share some elements. You can pull steps out of one how-to guide and apply them to your problem, "patching" the instructions on-the-fly as necessary.

In fact, if I don't have time to customize an answer for someone's question, I'll give a summary of how a problem breaks down, and point them to someone else's tutorials that cover aspects of the solution.

But the key is that in the general case, no one has written a tutorial for your exact problem. Most of the elements of the answer are already out there, and they are accessible when you learn the more general skill of decomposing problems and solutions into their constituent elements, matching problem-parts to solution-parts, and stitching together the whole fabric of an answer.

> I generally agree with this. Tutorials are most useful when they illustrate the building blocks for larger problems, and when they explain the why along with the how.

This is a big issue I have with a lot of microsofts documentation, they describe the steps in great detail (click this, type this, click that, right-click here) but will often completely skip they why. It's like every tutorial is for complete novice level developers. As soon as you have to do something that veers slightly away from the path you are back to square one.

I feel like this is a problem everywhere. I notice it every day in front-end development. Library/tools documentation almost always open with a "quick start guide", completely skipping over the question of "why". It then goes on to launch into step by step tutorials that are 90% code examples.

Code is nice, but it's hardly the whole story. Very few people seem to be able to explain the "why" behind the solution they're pushing on you. There's so much great code out there that is totally useless because of bad docs, or worse, is constantly mis-used by the community at large because nobody ever stops to ask "why".

WikiHow and HowToBasic disagree and prove otherwise. The wise thing to do here wouldn't be to ask "is it possible to have a tutorial, any tutorial, let alone the best, for every X application?" but to look up what people asking for and write a guide about that particular thing. Free traffic and ad clicks there and then!

My objective was not clickbait. I want to help beginners to help themselves—that's one of the things that will pay them off in the long run.

After re-reading your article, I think I understand the point you're trying to make, and it's a good one. The headline and first few paragraphs betray the real point you're trying to make though. They convey the impression that you're insulting the people who write tutorials, and the people who use well written tutorials as a learning tool. Hence why you're getting some hostile responses here that are orthogonal to the real point you're trying to make.

You might be thinking of WonderHowTo. HowToBasic is a satirical YouTube how-to channel.

HowToBasic's guide to creating a Todo MVC React App

1. Open editor of choice

2. Slap the keyboard with a raw fish

3. Crack a raw egg on the screen

> A question for you: is it possible to have a tutorial, any tutorial, let alone the best, for every X application?

Yes, it totally is. If someone is willing to write one, if someone wants to write one, that is their prerogative, and it isn't that hard to put it on a web page.

I think Gosha's point is that a lot of learners seem to want a tutorial that matches their specific use case 100%, down to the exact set of libraries and tools and versions that they're using. The more specific a tutorial they're looking for, the less likely it is that such a tutorial exists.

By learning to break down a problem into smaller pieces and looking for articles that are more about the principle than the exact identical set of tools, it's more likely that they'll find something that helps them solve the smaller individual problems, and thus helps them make progress on the larger task.

No, it isn't, for the reasons stated in the article. Is it possible "for any X application"? Absolutely; you could write a tutorial on how to do any one thing, but that's not what the question was.

This attitude does not support productivity or learning. Tutorials sometimes can be a simple series of steps to follow that avoid actually teaching concepts in depth but they are useful for two reasons: 1. Often, you only want to do something once, and don't care about learning all the details. In our modern lives, we do so many different complex tasks that saving our time and minds for the focus of our work is essential for efficiency. 2. A collection of weak tutorials, or even just one are better than nothing. Even if the tutorial doesn't directly explain advanced topics, reading between the lines on a few simple tutorials is vastly better than having no where to start.

These simple tutorials are huge wins for everyone's productivity, as millions of people learn to do the same task every day, you might be able to benefit from their notes more than you think

The OPs attitude is that when you choose to paint by number, as oppose to painting with more self reliance, that productivity and learning suffers even more. There are way too many tutorials that are application specific, and full of deprecated, bad, and useless implementations.

I remember when a tutorial was something that required a tutor. A person specifically trying to help you learn something, help your mind exercise and develop, guiding as needed and taking pleasure in seeing you make the connections yourself, tuning your input to support where needed and to let you soar where you could.

All these "tutorials" are a bunch of steps to follow. Words cheapen over time, and now we need a new word for it. And soon enough, a mouth-breathing youtube set of steps to follow will appropriate that word too.

Ah, listen to me. Old man, missing actual tutorials. Oh, how fast it was possible to learn something with a skilled tutor.

I think you can have one, and it'll be the next education revolution.

Take information about a product/theory, reduce it to parts, then put it together in a more individualized tutorial.

The AI is not in the what parts bit.

It's in making parts that can fit seamlessly together.

A way, through a known standard, to automatically create fake animations and people and spoken words from easily edited text.

Such that you can seamlessly slip in info the user doesn't know about and remove the crap they do (and mistakes, video editing is hard). Borrow parts from other peoples open tuts seamlessly.

It's a candle store, so search and replace shoe with candle.

I just want to say thank you to everyone who takes the time to write explanations and publish them for free, so that people like me can learn. Be that in the form of good insides like the ones in this article, blog posts, docs, tutorials, videos, etc.

What most help me is seeing different points of view. Sometimes the first explanation doesn't make sense, or the next one, but then you find someone who explains it from a different perspective and that's the one that makes you go ooohhh!

"TL;DR Spec the result you are aiming for. Break it down into smaller things. Identify what you know how to do, and what you don’t. Build what you know; research on what you don’t, and then build it too. Use tutorials to learn the concepts."

Tutorials are more helpful for tactics / procedures instead of strategy.

Creating beginners at both is important though, as is helping to encourage self-directed learning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com