Ask HN: What are the most beautifully written tutorials for beginners? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the most beautifully written tutorials for beginners?

21 pointsmrtimo16 comments

5 years ago I spun up my first EC2 instance after reading the tutorial called "EC2 for Poets". I have never forgotten how well it was written for an absolute beginner. What are the most beautifully written tutorials for absolute beginners across a variety of technical subjects (besides codeacademy - which is amazing)?

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As an absolute beginner, I actually feel qualified to contribute to a Hacker News thread. Pardon my excitement! As to the question at hand, I have found Zed A. Shaw's "Learn Python the Hard Way" e-book to be extremely helpful. As far as I remember, it assumes no prior knowledge of programming and gets you started right away on tutorials, opting to explain everything after you have the given code up and running. It certainly helps to burn the syntax of a given language into your brain through repetition and has ample amounts of humor peppered throughout.

You'll find this book, as well as a number of other books in the series, all freely available at the site: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/

I'm really enjoying Canva's Design School tutorials that simply and elegantly take complete beginners through the basics of good design with a series of hands-on exercises.

http://designschool.canva.com/tutorials/

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/

Not sure about consolidated collections, but I found the Arc language tutorial to be exactly what I want in a tutorial: concise yet providing good coverage of the topic.

http://www.arclanguage.org/tut.txt

Probably because the tutorials for beginners reach the most number of people (because advanced users are more likely to self-learn or use documentation, and because advanced topics are often specialized). Therefore there is the most value in making a good beginners tutorial.

Also, a tutorial for beginners can be written by someone who isn't an expert, but is a full or part-time professional writer or communicator. A tutorial for experts must be written by other experts, who don't have the time to learn and practice communications skills as much.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good is a fantastic introduction to Haskell in particular and functional programming in general. Definitely a great place to start:

http://learnyouahaskell.com

[Ruby on Rails] https://www.railstutorial.org/

Without question this is the single best beginner resource for learning Ruby on Rails I have ever come across. I tried CodeAcademy and a few other similar websites, but just couldn't connect the dots. Michael Hartl does an unbelievable job explaining web concepts in a simple, concise manner.

I can't recommend this resource enough.

OP here. Thanks for all the great comments. This is becoming a good resource. Here is a list of tutorials that I had my undergrad students do. Some are from MSDNA... https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hNliZd6kp1YBfDKQucnK8cV0...

I thought the Knockout tutorials were great: http://learn.knockoutjs.com/

The "Aviation Formulary" isn't really a tutorial, but it covers a ton of groovy GIS stuff in a way I haven't seen collected anywhere else, with worked examples.

http://williams.best.vwh.net/avform.htm

A bit domain-specific, but fantastic.

Arch's Beginner Guide will introduce you to the Arch way step by step, regardless of how familiar you are with Linux.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide

Shameless plug, wrote this interactive tutorial for regular expressions for a friend who was new to them. Seems to have helped a few other people along the way too.

http://regexone.com/

For complete beginners this is great! https://blockly-games.appspot.com/

Hands down my favorite on this front is probably the Clojurescript Koans site: http://clojurescriptkoans.com/

O'Reilly

Learning Perl

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018452.do

K&R and the comp.lang.c FAQ.

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