Not easy to learn coding from tutorials directly

bala41288 (70)in #india • 6 years ago

For the past two days, I have been working really hard to build a CRUD application by using cloud firestore which is one of the latest databases by Google to store and retrieve real-time data in a no SQL format. Initially, when I started the exploration it was quite easy because all I did was looking at some tutorials and understanding the basics. But when was watching tutorials everything seemed to look pretty good until I started to write the app by myself. Initially, I was quite confident that I will be able to write the app without any difficulty but when I got stuck for simple things and when I ended up looking at the documentation thoroughly to understand the methods that I have to use, it was really frustrating.

Even now I find it quite interesting only but the only fact is that I have to spend lots of time exploring each and everything to build my first app. The only self-motivation that any developer can have is the outcome we get after the app is successfully working. Most of the developers work with just self-motivation. Even though some part of their work will eat their brains out, they still manage to stick with the work and enjoy what they are doing. This gives them immense happiness because they get good fruit for their hard work and efforts.

Problems I have with tutorials

I believe this is a common problem that every developer will usually have. We will not get all the necessary information that we need from a single source. One video tutorial might look great but they would have used a technology which no one else would use. It can take quite a tough decision to choose whether to use the same technology or use the latest one. Some of the tutorials will be really amazing but may not be very comfortable for beginners. We might get our answers in another tutorial but the problem is, we might end up watching another 2 hours video to get what we really want.

It is quite a miracle if we get all the information in just one tutorial itself. Even if we magically find a tutorial that provides us with information on our exact requirement, it will not be that descriptive. We might end up looking for other sources and other documentation to understand a concept that was poorly explained in the tutorial. Some of the tutorials will be outdated out, we may not be able to use them directly for the current situation. If we try to upgrade the source code provided by them in the tutorial, we might end up with errors.

Tutorials are not walk on a park

Though coders are good explorers, it will be great if we can get all our requirements in just one tutorial itself. Recently I was looking forward to using a piece of code from one of the websites. The explanation on the website was really good and they shared the repository link as well in the article. But when I checked the repo, they had removed all the styling components from the code. Though it was quite old code, it matched our exact requirement. I even tried all possibilities but no luck at all to make use of that source code. I ended up writing the piece of code by myself for the app.

Some people also look forward to monitoring their source codes. They either keep it as private repositories or they provide you only a part of the actual code. You will have to look for other documentation to complete the other part of the code or switch to a different project. Building an app after watching a tutorial is just one part, the real frustration comes when we come across an issue and we really don't know why the issue is happening. We might have to then spend lots of time exploring why we are getting the issue and try to fix the issue to proceed further.

There are also positive tutorials

There are really good tutorials as well. The app that I'm currently working on is now easy for me because I was able to grab all the information from one particular tutorial. Thanks to the presenter who took efforts to make the video series. So in a way, there are also good tutorials available. But we cannot be sure that for all our requirements we will be able to get a good tutorial. Sometimes we might have to do our own work to get things to work. If we are fortunate enough we will get a working source code as a template for our project.

If we have no fortune, we will end up doing everything from scratch and end up doing every single piece of work with frustration. The only thing that we can think off to get rid of the frustration is to imagine the happiness we will be getting after completing the application we are indented to build. That gives great happiness and relief and it will even push us to work towards our next project with great enthusiasm.

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