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Syed Faraaz Ahmad
Syed Faraaz Ahmad

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Do you like interactive tutorials?

By interactive tutorial I mean, tutorials that contain unit tests for the tasks that you are supposed to achieve in that tutorial. One example is LearnYouNode. It is a tutorial series containing 13 problems that teach you Node.js

Learn You Node Image

Each problems has fixed task(s) that you need to complete and there are unit tests in place to check whether you've completed the tutorial properly, there is no guessing work.

So, do you like such tutorials? Have you ever seen similar ones? I'd really like to know.

Top comments (3)

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sargalias profile image
Spyros Argalias

In my opinion they are at best okay. Maybe 6/10 for the best ones.

If the tutorial is good, such as (in my opinion) Free Code Camp, then they are okay.

I remember doing LearnYouNode in the past and hated it. As a complete beginner to Node and inexperienced programmer, I felt like I learned some very specific and shallow stuff without any background as to how the thing works and how to use it in a project. To it's defence, maybe the target audience is experience programmers who are new to Node.

On the other hand, challenges like LeetCode and such are very good. They are not tutorials though.

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faraazahmad profile image
Syed Faraaz Ahmad

I agree. I faced a lot of frustration myself while attempting learnyounode. Would you have liked it better if the readme was more helpful, and was written like a tutorial than a challenge?

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Spyros Argalias

Yes I personally would have liked it a lot better as a tutorial. Maybe it was just a mismatch of my expectations and the intended audience, however a lot of people strongly recommended it for complete beginners to Node. I didn't have enough programming experience to judge for myself at that point.