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Blog spam is the bane of the n00b programmer. Even if you’re not totally new and are merely picking up a new language, it turns tutorial hell into eternal Hell.

Blog spam is the bane of the n00b programmer. Even if you’re not totally new and are merely picking up a new language, it turns tutorial hell into eternal Hell. Raspberry Pi tips is another quagmire of replicated garbage.

gregjor 5y ago
I've been mentoring a couple of junior programmers for a couple of years and I have seen the kind of junk tutorials and online misinformation they find. Some of it is useful because it shows so many bad ideas and implementations -- like studying a plane crash to find out what went wrong. I wrote an article about this back in 2007, regarding Javascript examples in an O'Reilly book -- a source I used to recommend because of the quality of their writing and editing (I no longer have that opinion). https://typicalprogrammer.com/learning-by-example-how-bad-code-propagates https://typicalprogrammer.com/learning-by-example-how-bad-co...
- arp242 5y ago
  It's not just an issue with blogspam, plenty of "bookspam" as well. A few years ago a friend of my then-girlfriend was learning C for some project. The book she had was so badly written even I could hardly follow it, and I can already program in C. It's no surprise this part of her project failed. I started programming on MSX-BASIC (kind of like C64), and when we finally got a PC in 2000 or so I got a book titled "Learn C++ in 10 minutes". It was so bad hat I was turned off from programming for a few years, as I thought I just didn't have what it takes (it also didn't help that the tooling and "getting started" was much harder back then, especially on Windows; if I had known you could just download e.g. Python instead of mucking about with this pirated Visual Studio I probably would have had an easier time – but I didn't know about that. It wasn't until I started playing with FreeBSD a few years later that I got back in to programming).
cerved 5y ago
also csharp, python, JavaScript

gregjor 5y ago

I've been mentoring a couple of junior programmers for a couple of years and I have seen the kind of junk tutorials and online misinformation they find. Some of it is useful because it shows so many bad ideas and implementations -- like studying a plane crash to find out what went wrong. I wrote an article about this back in 2007, regarding Javascript examples in an O'Reilly book -- a source I used to recommend because of the quality of their writing and editing (I no longer have that opinion). https://typicalprogrammer.com/learning-by-example-how-bad-code-propagates https://typicalprogrammer.com/learning-by-example-how-bad-co...

arp242 5y ago
It's not just an issue with blogspam, plenty of "bookspam" as well. A few years ago a friend of my then-girlfriend was learning C for some project. The book she had was so badly written even I could hardly follow it, and I can already program in C. It's no surprise this part of her project failed. I started programming on MSX-BASIC (kind of like C64), and when we finally got a PC in 2000 or so I got a book titled "Learn C++ in 10 minutes". It was so bad hat I was turned off from programming for a few years, as I thought I just didn't have what it takes (it also didn't help that the tooling and "getting started" was much harder back then, especially on Windows; if I had known you could just download e.g. Python instead of mucking about with this pirated Visual Studio I probably would have had an easier time – but I didn't know about that. It wasn't until I started playing with FreeBSD a few years later that I got back in to programming).

cerved 5y ago

also csharp, python, JavaScript