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Unpopular opinion: most beginner tutorials skip the hard parts

Last week I was following a Python tutorial on my laptop in a coffee shop in Austin. Everything worked fine until I tried to import a library and got some crazy error about PATH variables. The tutorial never mentioned that part so I spent 2 hours on Google and Stack Overflow figuring it out myself. Why do they always assume things just work? Has anyone else found a tutorial that actually explains the messy setup stuff?
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3 Comments
danielowens
Man, that's the thing nobody talks about... tutorials make it look like everything just works out of the box but real life is all those ugly hours of troubleshooting nobody wants to film. It's the same with learning to fix stuff around the house - the YouTube video shows a 10 minute job but doesn't tell you about the stripped screw you'll fight for an hour. The hard part is always the setup and broken dependencies, not the main thing you're trying to learn.
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lee.cora
lee.cora12d ago
Jen tried fixing her faucet. Five trips to the hardware store later.
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pat_harris
pat_harris12d ago
Story of my life Pat, @lee.cora knows ALL about this struggle.
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