[fright]

Most tutorial writers are terrible at what they are trying to teach. They may have a vague grasp of a concept, but that's about as far as it goes. If they were more capable they wouldn't be writing tutorials.

There are of course exceptions to this, but it covers at least 90% of the people who create courses for sites like Udemy.

Comes back to the old saying, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

[james_s_tayler]

It's interesting to watch people make inferences about the capacity of individuals to develop software based on the utterances of a 19th century Irish playwright.

My theory is that exposition is hard. Most people are shit at teaching.

[hombre_fatal]

These HN comments are pretty disheartening. What a dreary bunch.

To summarize them, people write free tutorials because they cannot do (they're bad developers), because they reap some sort of financial gain, or because they actually want to ruin an HNer's day who demanded amazing, free content.

I encourage all of you to try and write a tutorial. You'll see that it's simply hard. You have to decide on what level of skill to aim at, you need to think what this hypothetical person already knows vs doesn't know, you have to keep your tutorial aimed at this balance, you have to resist the temptation to yak-shave, and you have to resist the temptation to adulterate your tutorial with production concerns.

It's not clear-cut at all. Do you add this package because it's how you do it in production? Or do you show how to do it without it? And if you go for the latter, you probably want to at least point out that the package exists. And while you're there, why not include a quick example of how that package can sponge up some of the tutorial code? Maybe that would be more encouraging/illuminating? Are you going to help more people with this example than you're going to confuse? Is someone on HN going to call you meandering and incompetent because you chose to?

[james_s_tayler]

It's like trying on an item of clothing and concluding that the manufacturer is rubbish at making clothes because they don't fit you. A such uncharitably odd conclusion to come to.

[danieltillett]

>90% of all people doing something are not good at it. Why should teaching be any different than any other human endeavour.

[watwut]

The old saying is designed to make those who cant teach feel good and superior on expense of those who actually spend time to do something useful.

Teaching is a skill. Criticism can help people to learn how to do it better, devaluing everyone who even tries leads to culture where people won't put effort into it even if they could be good. All that because someone needed to feel superior for doing nothing.

[CyberFonic]

I think the saying you are referring to is:

"Those who can, do; Those who can't, teach."

[pjholmes]

Thanks for mentioning exceptions. I've found that Stephen Grider's courses on Udemy are outstanding. He's clearly found his calling in life. (I don't know him personally - have just taken many of his classes).

[newsbinator]

Likewise Maximilian Schwarzmüller on Udemy: teaching Vue, Typescript, React, Angular, etc.

You don't realize who bad most tutorials/courses are until you encounter one that is as logical, well-explained, and progressive as Maximilian's are.

[dalys]

I was recommended Stephen from a colleague and now I've also enjoyed Stephen Grider's courses. I also really like them and his style! So far I've only done Vue JS essentials and Complete React Native. If I could be selfish for a moment I wish he would do at least one more Vue course with some more advanced concepts and tackling managing a large project with Vue.

[ndnxhs]

This is exactly right. When I was an absolute beginner I tried learning things from tutorials and I even made a few myself but now in know more I learn everything from the documentation and posts on stack overflow.

[bostik]

> Most tutorial writers are terrible

Not just writers, most tutorials are objectively terrible.

Trying to find a reasonable example on how to get something moderately complex off the ground is a humbling reminder of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The probability of an internet resource being highly ranked and visible has a near-linear correlation with the resource's unsuitability.

In fact, when it comes to technology, it appears to me that the most prominent authors are barely novices themselves. To make things worse, the instructions and "guidelines" they come up with are invariably as competent as encouraging to use SSL_NO_VERIFY flag because passing CA path is too difficult.

My mechanism for coping on the internet is simple: whenever I see a tutorial on anything non-trivial, I just assume it's been written on Sunday afternoon, after the author discovered the software on Friday night. These tutorials should be considered the modern-day equivalent of their author smiling from ear to ear and shouting "look ma, no hands!".

Which traditionally has been the augur of "look ma, no teef!"

[james_s_tayler]

Well you get what you pay for.

[cwilkes]

> encouraging to use SSL_NO_VERIFY flag because passing CA path is too difficult.

And if they did spend extra time on that people would complain they are trying to teach two technologies at once.

Also that’s something everyone unless it is part of their day job has to look up a tutorial on how to do it.

Just a passing “this is for ease of use, don’t do it in production and consult a manual” would suffice.

[jungler]

In the back of my mind I always hope that a new technology I'm using will fail in a spectacular, obvious fashion as soon as I use it wrongly, because that means that a great number of resources will soon appear to cover all the gotchas.

It's the ones where spotting and debugging the source of the problem depends on fine-grained conceptual understanding, that leads to documentation that gives you a metaphorical blank stare and shrug.

[jonsen]

And those who can neither do, nor teach, rebel.

[CyberFonic]

I once came across a variant:

"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, CONSULT."

[fgandiya]

And those who can, were taught.