Showerthought: That "perfect" code tutorial set me back more than it helped

I spent 3 months last year following a popular Python course on Udemy. The guy teaching it was this super clean, polished YouTuber type who made everything look easy. But when I sat down to build my own project, a simple to-do app for keeping track of my garden plantings, I froze for 2 days. I realized he never once showed us what to do when you hit a bug or when the code just breaks in real life. I finally asked a buddy who's been coding for 10 years, and he told me to just Google the error and start fixing things. That was way more useful than the whole course. Am I the only one who feels those perfect tutorials are a trap for beginners?

2 comments

2 Comments

corap617d ago

Why do polished courses skip the messy part where you actually learn stuff?

casey3427d agoMost Upvoted

That's a really interesting point @corap61. I think a lot of course creators worry that showing the messy learning process will make them look like they don't know what they're doing. But the polished version often leaves out the most valuable part, which is the problem solving that actually sticks with you. It's like only showing the finished painting and skipping all the sketches and mistakes that led to it.