Some insight help please

1

I’ve been reading a lot of FCC learn to code articles on Medium lately. I realize that some are a couple of years old and I always check the comments sections, but here’s what confuses me. I see on the same article (often with thousands of “claps,” people praising the tutorial as great and easy to follow, while also many point out specific errors they are getting. Often there are no responses from the authors, and in many cases none of the questions are resolved.

I’m assuming that not all of the comments are from total newbies. I’ve found that in some rare cases even complex tutorials are so well written that with persistence and some research I am able to reproduce a working sample of the code.

I’m by no means well versed in React, but it would help to have some simple things laid out. I find that none of the Github source code works “out of the box.” If you fork and clone the code repository, open it on Github Desktop and from there into Visual Code, it will never work with Live Server. That makes sense though since I’d expect to have to run either yarn start or npm start from the app directory.

I’d expect that a repository bootstrapped with create-react-app would be ready to run. It never is. Am I confused? I have React, npm, and any other dependencies clearly listed globally installed (maybe not recommended as I go on in development). If I run yarn start on code that clearly said it used that, it always throws errors. The same with npm start.

I’ve found that I have to install npm (or yarn) again in the created React app directory, run audit fix and even then still won’t work. I’ve almost always had to add a .env file with SKIP_PREFLIGHT_CHECK=true to get past that.

If these are standard “precautions” when trying to follow a tutorial, why don’t authors clearly say that?

I recently found a well known, highly qualified author saying clearly in his article that he would provide the source code in a zip file. He didn’t. He linked a supposedly “free” video of the article’s tutorial. The code in the article was clearly different and inconsistent with the code in his video tutorial. He presented it in a format that did not allow you to easily obtain the source code unless you paid $250 to join. He also had a link to a community forum that was dead. I don’t know, but how much more self-promoting and self-serving can you get?

I don’t name him, but he’s not rare – and THAT is shameful.

Look, I accept FCC having us do research and digging to find out and really learn, but a little more clarity would not really hurt the “experts.”

2

Keep in mind that the articles that you are referring to aren’t written by FCC, but ones that are submitted to FCC by a diverse group of individuals. I suspect that some of the things, like the case that you mentioned where videos meant to go with the article are paid content, are matters of external resources being changed after the article was vetted by the FCC editor. (I’m not her, so I can’t say that absolutely, but FCC is pretty strongly anti-paywall). When you see something like that, it might be worth contacting FCC at team@freecodecamp.org.

3

Thanks, I realize there are a lot of conditions. Some are old. Maybe Medium never checks if updated and keeps publishing them. I’ll think long and hard about reporting because the person is highly qualified and well-known. It just seems like people should have enough ethical principles not to do their marketing and promotion in that manner.

4

I agree that people shouldn’t be sneaky jerks about trying to manipute you into buying their products. If you are ever concerned about an article or its links, feel free to send an email. Think of it more as giving a “heads up” rather than reporting someone.