[lux]

One thing that trips me up when I see this 4 quadrant structure for documentation is when to go with a tutorial and when to go with a how-to. Curious how others delineate between those.

[kaycebasques]

Tutorial takes you from an exact point A to an exact point B. Guide is much "looser" and just describes the general steps to get something done, without making any type of guarantee of being able to take you exactly from A to B. Mostly out of acknowledgment that the real-world is messy and everyone is going to have a slightly different system. Tutorial is for people starting from scratch or who want a gentle hands-on intro to your thing, guide is for people who are doing messy integration work with existing systems. It's not a perfect delineator but it'll get you most of the way there...

[juancampa]

The way I think about it is:

  - Tutorial: learn how the system works
  - How-to: recipes for common use-cases

[layer8]

Tutorial is a Getting Started, with no specific goal other than to serve as a general hands-on introduction. It does not assume any prior experience with the tool/product.

How-to(s) is a cookbook, targeting specific use cases, and may not particularly cater to novices.

[ketozhang]

In diataxis, a tutorial serves your education and a how-to guide serves your work.

Following this standard, a tutorial may contain a simpler or more contrived example; it may contain things you'd never do in production.