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Enough already with the lame “tutorials”

9 points by bronxcoder ↗ HN
Is it just me or are there way too many To Do List tutorials and "application boilerplates" floating about? It's great that people want to try out new frameworks, as I do all the time, but it would be much better if people tried building something a bit more detailed than the standard To Do app. And if you're going to do a To Do app, or any tutorial for that matter, it should include tests as testing is a priority when building real world applications.

11 comments

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tugberkk
I also think there are lots of tutorials, and many of them doesn't even help at all. But, remember that tutorials are for beginners, and they should be simple. If it include testing, I believe it could be even more complex (it may not be complex for everyone, but tutorials are mainly for newcomers) to understand.

I would rather see less but more effective tutorials.

bronxcoder
As a teacher of web development for people who are 100% new to programming, every application I have class build has tests. If you're going to teach people, especially newcomers, we should stress the importance of testing what you build and show how fun and easy it is to test as you build. :)
rchaud
It's good that testing is covered as part of your teaching strategy, because as you said, in any real world environment that experience will come in handy.

But the audience reading and sharing links on Hacker News are likely to have a deeper body of knowledge in this area than pure beginners. People posting tutorials (for free) may be targeting this more experienced group of people, who may take it for granted that a beginner's tutorial will not cover everything necessary to go from a prototype to production-ready software.

I also feel that as people progress through tutorials, they will organically come up with questions that the tutorial has not covered at all, like "how can I test this to make sure it's bug free and can withstand lots of concurrent logins?"

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dragonwriter
> It's great that people want to try out new frameworks, as I do all the time, but it would be much better if people tried building something a bit more detailed than the standard To Do app.

And, you know, people do. A tutorial app isn't the extent of what the author tried out, its something where the author felt would provide a good basis for pedagogy on the tool it is a tutorial for.

> And if you're going to do a To Do app, or any tutorial for that matter, it should include tests as testing is a priority when building real world applications.

Plenty of tutorials include testing, but if the framework being demonstrated isn't particularly special in terms of testing given the language and other aspects of the platform, there's not necessarily a compelling reason for every tutorial to do so.

Seems to me the complaint here is "people supplying job-relevant training material to the world for free aren't always doing it exactly the way I'd prefer to have it", which is pretty entitled.

bronxcoder
I'm not asking for job-relevant training material. It would just be more fun if tutorials were trying out different ideas. I relate it to if all authors wrote the same story you would be frustrated after a while that no authors were telling different stories.

For instance, whenever I find a new framework or methodology, I'll build out a replica of a whatever phone app is the du jour of the moment. Building the same app over and over again gets boring after a while and doesn't push your line of thinking. But that's just my opinion.

wmil
TodoMVC is great because every framework has to implement the same thing. That lets you see some of the warts of the framework.

Skimming over the official Angular docs and examples you probably wouldn't guess that ngRoute won't let you use $routeParams if the app doesn't include an ngView.

The TodoMVC example makes that obvious, since that's the only reason it splits of part of the page into a separate template.

Framework authors and evangelists will naturally show off examples that make the framework look good. People complaining about a framework usually don't understand it well.

Implementing a standard task is a great introduction to a framework.

[dead] T3RMINATED
How about a tutorial on how to please your mother you hater! get off hackernews now!
phantom_oracle
The To Do List MVC isn't all that great, but thankfully it beats the "I'm building a new language and here is my best effort 'Hello World' example, which should be good enough for you to code anything from."

Try starting your own blog and coding a more lengthy example OP. Be the change.

siquick
This is why I like what the guys at Onemonth are doing. The Python/Django course guides you through building a Yelp style app while the Rails and Swift courses build a Pinterest / Instagram clone.

I've done both the Rails and Django courses and while I'm nowhere near being experienced in either, I'm far more motivated to keep learning the languages than I have been after doing any other course/tutorial

http://mbsy.co/onemonth/10695276 (affiliate link)

bbcbasic
This is why I don't write Haskell tutorials. I am learning and would love to write them, but I don't want to pollute the space when more experienced Haskellers can write better ones. I just need to be patient :-). Actually I do write them but just keep them on my dropbox (private) for a memory refresh on a topic later on.