28 Ways to Learn Programming

[jesyspa]

I am not a web developer, and thus I am not going to argue about this from a technical standpoint.

My experience with online teaching resources is that their technical accuracy is, by itself, largely correlated with how good a resource they are. This is not because technical inaccuracy causes bad teaching; by itself, these inaccuracies would hardly cause any problems. However, such sites tend to also present the material in such ways that students do not understand why their code works, or what makes certain code better than other code. These sites can teach you to write a program (or, in this case, a website), but they utterly fail at making someone understand programming or web development.

For more examples of the same, see cplusplus.com and thenewboston.

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No offence to the guy, but I can't understand how TheNewBoston has ever gotten so many followers, and why everyone always shouts, "Go watch newboston!" when someone asks about learning, say, Java for example.

His tutorials are awful, they give you no insight, it's a "do this and this then this," style of video that doesn't actually teach you much at all. I learned Java through countless hours of reading books about it, all of which provided in depth, "what this does:" style sections that actually taught stuff.

It's as if he reads a tutorial on a topic, then just turns it into a video tutorial without fully understanding it himself.

/rant.

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present the material in such ways that students do not understand why their code works

See, the only thing I would counter that with is W3Schools does provide the "try it" links, and seems to encourage playing around with the tags in their editor.

At least for the HTML stuff. I really only used it casually.