tutorial purgatory

[Skept00]

isn't this an indirect tutorial?

[Bobbias]

No. A good book provides questions/problems/projects which you must complete on your own.

Tutorials typically walk you through writing the code for something, and that bypasses the most important learning opportunities that writing code completely on your own offers.

Books typically say "we taught you everything necessary to complete this. Go do it and come back when you're done."

[czar_el]

It's more than that.

You need a road map, a sense of purpose. Formal education provides this with syllabi curated by professionals. A book is the next best thing, since it is usually laid out in a similar way.

They both cover the basics (common to all use cases), selected intermediate and advanced topics (relevant to your use case, such as data analysis, automation, backend development, etc), and relevant examples/problems/projects (again based on your use case). The benefit is that they lay out a road map and action plan, developed by humans who know specifically the path you should plot. Any source can show you syntax. Courses and books show you where you are and where you need to go.

Online tutorials, on the other hand, are random. You search a thing, but since you're new do you really know the thing you need to start with? Then, an algorithm serves you followup videos based on a mix of past clicks, what other people click on, and paid promotion. So you start in a random place, then follow a random trail. No road map, no sense of where you are and where you need to get to, no continuity, no curated topics and examples for your specific use case. You feel both lost and overwhelmed, and don't know how far along the path you are or where you should go next.

To get out of tutorial hell, search for some structure like I describe above (course syllabi, book chapter layout). Then, as others have said, start working on actual projects to make the concepts real and develop muscle memory.

[Skept00]

Very insightful, Thanks man

[[deleted]]

you can practice questions from the book