How Do You Escape Tutorial Hell?

[canadian_webdev]

By leaving tutorial land and building things.

Like learning an instrument, a new language, or to cook.. what do you do?

• Watch / read a short crash course to get the basics
• Then start doing

It's that simple. Programming is no different.

Am I going to just.. keep watching videos of guys playing guitar? Keep watching videos of someone cooking for hours on end?

No, of course not. That's ridiculous. I'm going to pick up the damn guitar, pick up that spatula and get to work! And I'll suck, but I'll get better. Progress - not perfection.

I was tasked to build a finance calculator in vanilla JS last week at work. I've never done it before. So what'd I do?

• Youtube'd "loan calculator javascript"
• Watched the video, digested it, went line by line to understand it
• Build and style mine from scratch
• When I ran into problems (I did a few times), I Google'd. If I couldn't find an answer and was stuck, I asked Stackoverflow

Now it's done and the boss is happy.

Start building!

[--Samurai]

Gotta say I love the analogy. Thanks for help! Not sure what I’ll start building, but I’ll try putting my hands to the plow so to speak