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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 th

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.

flukus 9y ago
> 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.
- BigJono 9y ago
  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".

flukus 9y ago

> 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.

BigJono 9y ago
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".