Using tutorials is beneficial if you make notes

Posted by Its_An_Outraage@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 8 comments

Okay hear me out. A see a lot of people complain about what we call "tutorial hell" where people follow tutorial after tutorial but never actually learn anything.

Often the responses to these kind of posts is just to create things with what you learnt from the tutorial, but that doesn't help much if you didn't learn anything because, well... you just copied code without understanding why it was written like that, or why that framework/library was used.

This is where making notes on the content you're consuming helps. It makes the process of following a tutorial much slower and it has taken me multiple hours to get through 15 minutes of a tutorial before. But describing what it is you are doing, what the function you just wrote does, what purpose of each frameworks or libraries you are using serves allows you to really understand the code you are essentially copying line for line.

Once you understand it you can modify it, you can write your own with at least an idea of what you are doing and why. If you stumbled into a problem, what did you do to fix it? Did you find the solution in a forum post? Then note down that link so you can review the explanation of that solution.

Don't just blindly copy code. Understand the decisions that were made to create that code. Document the process. Trust me, it helps wonders.

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boleban8@reddit

In my opinion, it's more effective to learn by working backwards.

What is the backwards approach?

Drag the progress bar to the end of the video to see what the final realization looks like, and then ask yourself: what functions are needed to achieve this function or effect, and what is the order in which they are called.

An analogy: Like a jigsaw puzzle, the first way is that you see what the puzzle will look like when it's finally completed, then you break up the pieces, and then you try to put them together. The second way is: you try to put together a picture without seeing what the final whole looks like. The first case is much easier than the second, because you are already able to see the whole and probably know how the parts are related.

EuphoricView7988@reddit

I disagree a little, but mainly because you got your point right but correlated that to the fact you're doing notes, for me personally I used to take notes for everything to the point it was counterproductive for the same reason you're saying not taking notes is counterproductive, which is not doing any mental effort to understand it in your own words, taking notes could potentially take you on the same path, in fact I had to literally scrap any possible way to take notes and rely solely on bookmarks and memory, nowadays I don't take notes unless I'm reviewing a concept with more knowledge than the first exposition to that concept, what I generally do (mostly because the medium which is pdfs enable that) is adding bookmarks.

Your solution is clear and I totally share it, the solution is getting involved in the material, for example the tutorial guy imports a module, does a few thing, what I tend to do there is just watch, listen, and concentrate at his/her point, and afterways I remember what he/she said and literally search it myself without guidance on google, open the documentation, try to extrapolate what was explained but at the same time doing it through the more bloated and general information overload that is documentation, then I start to explore a little until I find myself near a rabbit hole or I just cannot do anything.

high_throughput@reddit

My favorite is freestyling the tutorial. Writing my own project using the same kind of features that the tutorial tries to teach.

Its_An_Outraage@reddit (OP)

Not a bad way to go, but much more difficult when you're being introduced to entirely new concepts you haven't seen before.