Ask HN: How do you feel about the “programming tutorial” experience on internet? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you feel about the “programming tutorial” experience on internet?

13 pointsmlejva7 comments

It feels like a very subpar experience. I noticed that I started subconsciously filtering out coding tutorials in my Google search results. Especially if the tutorial is on Medium.

My ideal platform for programming tutorials:

- is open-sourced so you can run the platform on your own website

- developers can easily keep track of what tutorials they started/finished and search in them

- authors own their tutorials and can monetize them

- has built-in programming environment - something more like a notebook where you can see both text + code on the same level. Also partly Repl.it so you can start the tutorial asap without any hassle in your browser

- code is the first-class citizen

- tutorials can be versioned

- tutorials have issues

- tutorials can be cloned and accessed offline

- tutorials can be forked

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I think it was a mistake to tell juniors everywhere that they blogging and personal brand building were career hacks. Too many people are churning out low quality content because they think it will give them a career or hiring advantage.

These days, many of the best programming tutorials can be found by going straight to the source documentation. Many popular projects and vendors are providing volumes of useful examples to get people started. Beyond that, many of the companies offering low-cost training courses are significantly better than what random people are offering on the open internet.

That said, your platform suggestion feels overly complicated. The more complicated the platform, the more the tutorials become the centerpiece of the experience rather than the code itself. In an ideal world, users would allocate as much mental energy as possible to the code and learning, without being bogged down by dealing with the tutorial platform.

A platform that is self-hosted by random people across the internet with tutorials that are cloned, forked, versioned, and modified across different websites sounds like a step in the wrong direction. In an ideal world, beginners would be able to get started on a good tutorial right away. If they instead have to sift through endless Google listings of slightly modified, forked tutorials while I search for the most updated or "best" fork, they're going to waste all of their energy on the tutorial process.

In a perfect world, the best tutorials would be mated as closely as possible to the source project documentation. Keep it simple and obvious.

Thinking about it, I agree that forking might not be a desirable feature. But giving an option for people to host the platform on their own website is a prevention that the tutorials will get deleted just because the platform says so.

Maybe the "platform" should be embeddable so you can have it as part of your documentation, for example.

I think we mostly follow wrong approach with programming tutorials. I have heard a term called "Tutorial purgatory" you may Google it. Following tutorial just for the heck of it is pretty waste of time and energy. Instead focus on projects. Having a problem to solve in front of us can make us tinker on it's available solution and that's where those tutorial come handy. What people generally follow is tutorial->projects. What we must follow projects->tutorial.

Do read more about tutorial purgatory. It's definitely eye opener.

> Having a problem to solve in front of us can make us tinker on it's available solution and that's where those tutorial come handy.

This is huge. Start with the problem and read/watch enough to gather a solution, rather than learn for the sake of learning. Reminds of me just-in-time advice vs. just-in-case advice.

I don't think I've had any bad experience with tutorials. Probably because I have low expectations for them anyway. There are a few excellent examples though like learnopengl.com. Books and official documentation is where it's at for me.

One of low BS source I found is .edu sites.

And I see documentation and freely available books first, authenticity and being able to view offline.

A rule of thumb is heavily click bait or ad filled sites (eg geeksforgeeks) are likely to be shit.

Git(hub) + videos on udemy or youtube is the ideal solution and everything else is just unnecessary. If there is anything more i'd rather just figure it out myself if the documentation is ok.

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