rowan2•26d ago

Hot take: Project based learning vs tutorial hell for beginners

I went to a local coding meetup last week at a coffee shop downtown, and there was this total split in the room. Half the people were saying you gotta build your own stuff even if it's ugly, and the other half were insisting that working through a full tutorial first is the only way to actually understand the basics. I've been stuck in tutorial hell for like 3 months now, copying code but feeling lost when I try to make my own thing. Which side do you fall on and how did you finally break through if you were in the same boat?

3 comments

3 Comments

mary77626d ago

Yeah I really disagree with the "tutorial or nothing" crowd. I spent 4 months doing nothing but tutorials and still felt totally lost the second I closed the browser. What finally clicked was just building something really dumb like a to do list that saves to your browser storage. It wasn't pretty or impressive but I actually had to figure out why my code was breaking. Tutorials just let you copy without thinking. You gotta break stuff on your own to learn.

norathomas26d ago

Yeah I totally get that. Tutorials are like training wheels for code, you never really learn to balance until you take them off and crash a few times. There's nothing like staring at a blank editor and realizing you actually have to think for yourself.

tyler_bell26d ago

Man I used to think tutorials were the only way but you totally changed my mind.