What is Tutorial hell and how to get out of it?
HEY, I know you are reading this article on tutorial hell because you feel you are also stuck in one. So let’s dive deep into it.
WHAT IS A TUTORIAL HELL?
Tutorial hell is where we watch many endless long tutorials online in order to learn and gain skills and make ourselves believe that we are making progress and building something new and makes us feel, we are being productive and improving our skills by watching tutorials and coding along, where we spend 8 hours for 3–4 hours long tutorial.
MY STORY WITH TUTORIAL HELL
My journey of getting into the tutorial hell started in 2019 at the time of the Pandemic of covid-19, as a student who wanted to improve my skills and learn something, my friend suggested I buy a course on Udemy, and the next day I purchased web development course and started right away excited to start, the course was of 70 hours in total it took me around 2–3 months to complete it. After completion of the course, it felt great that I build something, in order to learn more I decided to buy another course on Udemy, this continues watching videos didn’t stop anytime sooner when I started to look for more tutorials on YouTube where you will find an endless number of tutorial videos.
This Long journey tutorial after tutorial didn’t end till the next 2 years, one day I decided to build something of my own as I was confident thinking that I have done the course and I can build something on my own. but as I started my own project, I didn’t remember almost anything that I learned from the course and tutorials. That’s when I came to know about the concept of tutorial hell and made changes to the way I used to learn to code.
SO WHAT REALLY IS TUTORIAL HELL AND WHAT HAPPENS IN IT?
We continuously watch tutorial after tutorial to learn to code by coding along with the instructor’s code to build the same and later upload it to our Portfolio profile. what really happens in tutorial hell is that you think really are learning and improving your skill sets but in reality, it’s actually quite the opposite for most of us, where you didn’t learn much just from coding along. Suppose you’re given a new project to build and begin you will feel confident that you can do it because we’ve done a lot of tutorials online, but as we start to build you will realize that you don’t remember most of the things that you learned from tutorials. It happened because you never created a project on your own aside from code-along videos.
The problem with tutorials is that they make your code along and you do it. But as you face an error while coding along you get confused because the code of the instructor in the video is working all fine but you getting an error. you try to look for a solution u don’t find the exact solution you need and later on give up. we are so got used to coding along that we didn’t try to understand the basic concepts of it while learning it. I wouldn’t say tutorials are wrong, some tutorials are really great only if you pay attention and learn from them and build it on your own from scratch.
THINGS TO AVOID IN TUTORIAL HELL
1. Avoid Tutorials
The first thing you have to do is stop watching tutorials online, if you don’t stop now you will be stuck in tutorial hell watching tutorial after tutorial. you are not learning to your full potential by just watching tutorials.
2. Don’t buy an Outdated course
Yes I know I said no tutorials but there are a few courses that are great. Avoid buying an Outdated course if you are planning to buy one because the technology is upgrading and we need to keep up with the latest. if you buy an outdated course like 3 to 4 years old, it may turn out some features are deprecated from the course in your present time.
WAYS TO GET OUT OF TUTORIAL HELL
1. Stop watching tutorial videos and learn from Official documentation
As I said earlier stop watching tutorial code along videos and go through the official documentation. Official Documentation is the best place you can find to learn to code. if you don’t get any concept in documentation, you can always google it, you will find thousands of articles related to it on many blogs.
2. Build a project from scratch
Its time to build and learn something new on your own. as you start to build a project from scratch you will face many errors no doubt, More errors you will face more you will learn by solving them if you can’t find a solution online, you can just create one. So let the error appear don’t be scared just read the error, google it, and most of the time you will solutions on Stack overflow or any other site, and that’s how a real developer codes.
3. Ask for help
You will come to a point where you can’t find a solution online or create on your own, you can ask for help for example you can ask it on Stack Overflow and there are many peoples and some may solve your error for you.no need to be shy to ask for help even if it’s online or in-person to someone who is an expert, just ask it and you will also learn from those errors.
4. Read technical blogs
Yes, read technical blogs online because some of us don’t understand the difficult language of the official documentation, blogs written by people online are easy to read and understandable. you may come across many interesting articles written by the best people.
In the end, everyone has their own way of learning to code and grow as a developer. I would suggest only watching tutorials if only if you have no coding experience and also just for basics and later on you have the documentation learn from. I hope some of you find your way out of your own tutorial hell and start to learn in the proper way as developers do. Thank you for reading till the end.
Good luck coders.
