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There is a lot of good advice about details! Especially one that got my heart: > Some authors design their tutorials the way you’d give instructions for an or
by stared 2y ago
There is a lot of good advice about details!
Especially one that got my heart:
> Some authors design their tutorials the way you’d give instructions for an origami structure. It’s a mysterious sequence of twists and folds until you get to the end, and then: wow, it’s a beautiful swan!
> A grand finale might be fun for origami, but it’s stressful for the reader."
Yes, a lot of tutorials are puzzle games. You need to guess other tools to install, which are obvious to the author, but not everyone.
I would add a few things:
* Have two types of examples - minimal and the most typical (one is to show the essence without distraction, the second to serve as a practical starting point)
* Always provide the full code sequence to run code; if there are any assumptions, these should be listed explicitly (e.g. "it needs Node 22"); you hinted a bit, but since many tutorials miss that, it deserves attention.
Even better, if it is possible to combine it into one point and make it runnable. For example, for a package I had been developing, livelossplot, I made Jupyter Notebooks runnable in Colab:
* https://colab.research.google.com/github/stared/livelossplot/blob/master/examples/minimal.ipynb https://colab.research.google.com/github/stared/livelossplot...
* https://colab.research.google.com/github/stared/livelossplot/blob/master/examples/pytorch.ipynb https://colab.research.google.com/github/stared/livelossplot...
- jasonjmcghee 2y agoThis is something that resonates / I really strive for. Cutting corners / over simplifying intentionally to have a "working" (poor) usable step along the way, that you can then improve / fix and explain why you can't / shouldn't cut those corners. Not applicable to all tutorials, but I like this approach because it feels more like an exploratory learning experience rather than prescriptive instruction.