Has following "code along" tutorials on developing dynamic webpages and websites help you become a better developer?

Share your experiences with that.

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I personally don’t like “coding along” tutorials because I feel I’m following steps instead of learning. But I have learned a lot from this one. It is the best Flask tutorial out there and the basics I learned here helped me when I decided to try Node.

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Nope.

I’ve done a few tutorials here and there and learned a few things, but I don’t think they magically “make you better”.

If I look back to all the experiences that gave me the most experience, they call come with doing things by myself. If I want to learn something new, I make a side project around it and just start. I usually struggle, mess up a ton, and have issue after issue, but I learn a lot! during the process.

Think, if you spend a few days learning how to get X setup on your computer, then spend a few more days ironing out the kinks, then spend a few more days getting things how you want them, you just learned tons of practical knowledge first hand!. A tutorial might gloss over all that in a few seconds/minutes (!).

Think, in the real work there is no “step by step guide”, to most situations you run into. So following one is a distant reflection of what you will run into in the real world. Even if the path of learning it yourself takes longer, is harder, and more frustrating, the experience is what is called experience. If you ever meet a 10x engineer, odds are they have plenty of experience because they have dealt with the issues before themselves, not because they watch tons of tutorials.

Tutorials are there to show you want can be done, but you gotta put in the time and work yourself to find the pitfalls and fill in the blanks :smile:

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I have to disagree with the posters above and say they’ve helped a lot. Whether it’s being introduced to new concepts or ways of doing things or just expanding and building on knowledge I already have. You can still run into plenty of problems following tutorials that need to be worked through and sometimes it’s good to have a blueprint for concepts you might not be familiar with.

I would say they can help to learn new things, but just learning is not enough to make you better, the only way to get better is through practice: do projects following your imagination, or find vague instructions that you need to interpret to know what you should be doing, or detailed instructions that you need to respect to the dot , that’s practice, doing things on your own. That makes you better.

But if you asks if the tutorial are useful… the answer is that it depends, do they help you learn new things?

definitely help but i prefer just watching rather than coding along

Here’s a real world example:

I was learning RxJS and watched a few videos on the topic. The videos gave me some context on how to think and how it works. They were very informative and I felt pretty comfortable with the subject. (no pun intended :wink: )

I opened up an RxJS Stackblitz sandbox project to checkout what I learned. It was generated with the following code:

of('World').pipe(
  map(x => `Hello ${x}!`)
);

I already got confused because the syntax looked totally different than what the tutorial went over.

The reason for this was the library syntax had changed recently, and thus the entire tutorial syntax was different and outdated. I eventually figured out the difference between the legacy syntax the video went over and the newer “correct” syntax.

The docs were updated, the library was updated, stackblitz was updated, but the tutorial was outdated as were the “teaching materials”. This is usually why I leave tutorials as secondary learning materials, the code is what matters. Its easier to get help for errors your getting than trying to learn about all the errors you could get.

It doesn’t mean don’t watch tutorials, just don’t focus on them to learn the subject. I think tutorials are the best to learn about things, but not in-depth learning. :slight_smile: