Everyone learns in different ways but something you usually can't escape is tutorials for new concepts, but what makes a tutorial great for you?
My team and I spend our time jumping around a load of different stacks or pieces of tech to test concepts for the business, build out some prototypes and try and integrate some of the newer ideas into our existing solutions!
To build these ideas out, we end up reading a load of docs, academic papers and combing search results for what the best tutorials or breadcrumbs to start out - over time we've got this down to a fine art. Most of the time, we can quickly pick up a post and decide to move on or keep reading,
There are some standout points that push one a tutorial one way or the other for me are;
- Clarity & communication - how easy it is to read
- Length & depth - is it a simple vertical or a step by step to a specific goal
- Explained code snippets as a % of the content
- Links to further resources & repos
This is my personal preference, and I'm sure everyone has something different, so what makes a great tutorial for you?
Oldest comments (2)
My favourite kind of tutorials are the end to end ones where the author had a specific goal or task in mind (e.g. building something), and they documented their entire journey to completing it. When people are writing about something new that they're learning, they tend to make less assumptions about your level of knowledge which makes things a lot easier to understand.
They are pretty good, I gravitate towards them myself, actually used a "ShowDev" post here yesterday for some guidance on packaging a similar app!
Interesting point about the assumptions that they make about readers knowledge, never thought it about it that way before, definitely going to consider that next time I write a tutorial style post!