Why does nobody talk about how tutorial purgatory kills more beginners than bugs do | Coding For Beginners - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals
Why does nobody talk about how tutorial purgatory kills more beginners than bugs do
I have been learning Python since January and I counted 14 saved bookmarks on my laptop, 9 of them are beginner courses I never finished past lesson 4. Last week I deleted all of them and just built a dumb little grocery list script that broke 6 times, and I learned more about functions from fixing those breaks than from 3 months of following along. The problem is tutorials make you feel smart while the guy on screen types, but you never hit a wall you have to climb. Every beginner I talk to at my library's code meetup in Ohio has the same stack of half done courses sitting there. If you got past this, what was the moment you finally stopped watching and started building?
Fourteen bookmarks and nine unfinished courses is a lot, but I am not sure that adds up to tutorials killing beginners. People quit lots of hobbies. I have a guitar in my closet that I have not touched since 2019 and nobody blames the guitar. The grocery list script taught you functions because you had a reason to care about the answer, and that reason could have shown up whether you finished a course or not. Plenty of folks just are not that into it once the new feeling wears off.