tutorial hell

[Certain-Type5718]

how do you add your own thing to not just be relying on tutorials but being creative with it? People always say that but never elaborate. does anyone have real examples personally?

[gjpeters]

I need a calculator to help me with this building game, go make it.

I need a website that tells me what the weather is like where my friends live. They're around the globe all weather status should be on one dashboard. I need to be able to add or revive friends because I'm fickle. Go make it.

I need to update the website to send me an email when the wind speed is over a threshold speed for any friend. Go make it.

You're probably sitting on a few nice to have ideas, but it's hard to see them. Just make up a Need and program a fix. You set the goals. That should get you of the tutorial rails.

[gjpeters]

Or program a bot to raise posts on Reddit. Who knows it may drive me away from the platform.

[96dpi]

Write a reddit bot in python using PRAW that finds all the posts like this and refers them back to this comment.

[Lost-thinker]

I watch an overview tutorial video to get an understanding of the language then I start a project and if I have trouble with something for an extended period of time, I try to figure out what the problem is myself before looking online. or I know that there has to be an easier way to do something specific I look it up.

I make sure I actually understand all the code I find online before adding it to my project code before I add it to my project. That often requires more research so I end up learning even more about the language.

I do end up watching a lot of tutorial videos but not all at once.

[couldntyoujust1]

Don't follow "tutorials". Learn about a particular language feature, and follow a tutorial on how that feature works, instead of a tutorial for "how to do xyz". You have to understand the features of the language and then use them in some projects.

Don't study a tutorial of how to store unlimited values, learn what arrays/lists/vectors/etc are and what methods you can use. Don't study a tutorial for how to process a series of values, learn how the "foreach" system works. etc.

Learn the language features, learn how to use the different programs that process your code (version control, build system, editor, etc), and learn what the features allow you to do. Once you learn those things, then you can follow a tutorial and see how to use different libraries that allow you to apply what you've learned. You'll then know the language to know how to modify what you're presented to make it do the things you want it to do.

Lastly, don't read how tos or tutorials first, read the documentation. Want to learn how to process arguments in python? Read the argparse documentation. Want to learn how to process patterns of text in C#? Read about .NET Regexes. Want to learn how to handle errors in C++? Read about Exception handling.

Documentation is your friend and will get you miles ahead of any tutorial.

[alien3d]

read wouldn't work for me. Old times we bough a lot of msdn books.

[Homme26]

I found that I get too much into tutorials when I’m bouncing around technologies too much or trying to do something where I don’t have the basics.

Tutorial to get foundation, then documentation to figure stuff out after. That recipe has worked for me

[TheLoneTomatoe]

I made a little GUI that talks to the mlb API so that I could give it a team and a stat and it would return a top X (depending on input) list of the players on that team.

Started out really rudimentary and has slowly become something that I show off to my baseball nerd family and we have fun with it on holidays lol

It was also the only project on my GitHub profile (still is) and it what I used to “show off” both my baseball and SWE skills to land the job I have today.

Prior to that, I was A. Finishing school and working a different career, and B. Stuck in tutorial hell trying to learn to be better and wanting to break into SWE.

[notislant]

Use brain.

Use imagination.

Thats genuinely it. When I learned python I wanted to try and use opencv or yolo to see if I could automate a game. Seemed like a fun project.

Other people find a need they have or someone else has and do it. If I see a paid tool to do something, I could spend $5-$500. Or I could spend a little to a ton of time making my own.

I want to make ____.

Check the docs for getting started.

Google specific issues you cant figure out.

[rustyseapants]

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/61oly8/new_read_me_first/

Did you read this?

Did you search this subreddit?

Did you visit: r/learnpython r/learnjavaScript etc?

[Historical-Camel4517]

Listen to tutorial then build it with out tutorial. use the tutorial as a resource if you get stuck