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In my opinion, we have far too many "Getting Started With [technology]: Part 1" tutorials and not nearly enough lessons on advanced topics. I get it, creating t
by k1ns 8y ago
In my opinion, we have far too many "Getting Started With [technology]: Part 1" tutorials and not nearly enough lessons on advanced topics. I get it, creating these lessons takes time and dedication that often isn't apparent until you're nearly done. I've started work on combating this phenomenon myself by creating lessons that do cover advanced topics but even those fall short of where I'd like them to be.
When it comes to "writing a tutorial" for the benefit of your own knowledge, it's been proven to work. This is very good advice when it comes to personal gain. However, for the sake of beginners and content creators that are active in the tutorial community, please consider throwing out these lessons when you're done. It might help someone out there at some point but you have to take into account your initial motive: personal advancement. Lessons that are taught out of passion for teaching and advancing the knowledge of those around you are often the best because they come from a selfless place. Lessons created for the creator's own advancement are often not as helpful. This is something I struggled with when creating my own tutorials. Was I creating it out of love for teaching others, or was there some hidden motive that even I might not be aware of?
This is simply my own opinion, take my comment with a grain of salt. I'd be interested to hear what others think about the prevalence of "beginner" tutorials juxtaposed with an apparent lack of those that would be considered "advanced".
- WhompingWindows 8y agoFor me, it's the rare errors/workarounds that need more love. It's not rocket science to learn Python, yet we somehow have literally 100's of guides on how to start learning Python. Once you dive into a particular niche method, though, there may be a couple of SO posts unanswered or with unsatisfactory/ungeneralizable results. If you don't have an experienced mentor and you're on your own, I find that situation pretty hard to deal with. It may be some basics that you're lacking as an intermediate, non-advanced practitioner, because you relied on this patchwork of beginners' tutorials limited to the main/easiest tasks in the language. When I was learning R, the tutorials I looked at didn't mention selecting columns with $, which was a very poor oversight and led to some "dumb questions" to my mentor.