The problem with programming tutorials

We’ve all been there. You want to learn a new skill, so you go on the internet to look for resources that you can learn from.

This is no different when learning to code. Whether you enrolled in Computer Science and want to learn additional programming skills in your free time, or you are trying to learn it from scratch by yourself, online programming tutorials can be a fun and easily accesible way to get started. Alot of them are also free, which means that you can get started right away.

While programming courses are indeed a great resource to get started, you should look out for some of the pits you might fall into in the learning process. In this article, I want to go over 3 of them, so that you hopefully can avoid them on your path to becoming a great software developer.

1: It’s difficult to know where to start

Programming tutorials is and will probably always be some of the best ways to learn to code, but it is also important to approach it with the right mindset.

When you start out as a programmer, it is very tempting to jump right into the newest and hottest ReactJS crash course on youtube, because you want to build fancy and functional user experiences from the get go. But this is the wrong way to approach it.

Whether you want to be a front end engineer, backend engineer, game developer or something else, it will always be time well spent to learn the fundamentals of programming before moving on to the more advanced stuff. You will thank yourself for it later down the road, as your deeper knowledge of programming will help you grasp advanced topics more easily.

My recommendation is that you skip the crash course tutorials on youtube at first and focus on the fundamentals in software development like variables, data structures, loops, conditional — as well as best practices for designing, testing, implementing and debugging code. A good book for this would be “Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction” by Steve McConnell.

2: You don’t improve your problem solving abilities

One of the most important skills as a programmer is the ability to solve a problems for your boss or customers and understand complex business logic.

My experience from using online tutorials to learn programming is that, more often than not, their use case is too specific. Let’s take a “How to make a (insert popular website here) clone in React” for example. Sure, you will get some inspiration from it and get some insight in how to build an application like that — But the problem with this approach is that you don’t come up with the solution yourself.

More often than not, you are probably more likely to just follow the tutorial blindly. At the end of the tutorial, you will have a nice product, but will have a hard time recreating it on your own.

You should use these tutorials as inspiration and use them as a supplement to your learning process. Force yourself to build the solution with your own knowledge and only use tutorials as guidelines when you’re stuck.

3: You could end up in tutorial purgatory

This somewhat goes hand in hand with the other points I’ve made in this article. I pointed out that learning the basics and not throwing yourself into too advanced topics at first is very important.

The mistake that alot of people make is that they don’t have a goal. Instead of making a detailed plan on how to reach their goal, they just watch tutorials and hope that someday they will be able to build reliable and scalable software.

Hint: They won’t.

Instead, they end in what many people call “tutorial purgatory”, which means that they aimlessly watch hours and hours of content online without learning the nessecary skills to become a good programmer.

The best way to avoid this is to learn the basics first, and then force yourself to build a project from the ground up with the knowledge that you have. It doesn’t have to be perfect — when you get stuck, you can ask on forums or watch tutorials that touch the exact problem you’re facing. This will ensure that you challenge yourself and use the skills that you know, while simultaneously focusing and bettering yourself on the topics that you have less knowledge off.

This will also in turn make the experience more rewarding — it will always be more fun to build something on your own.

The end

This was my first article on medium, and I hope you liked it!

Remember to follow me if you want to see more articles in the future on programming topics such as Design patterns, ReactJS, SQL, MongoDB, Firebase, NodeJS, ASP.NET Core, PHP, Java, Blazor Server, Firebase, Azure — and much more.

Thank you.