Top 5 irritating things in programming tutorials
Trivia: back in the days people who wanted to learn how to program had to attend a school or programming courses or, beleve it or not, actually buy and read books. Lucky for us, those days are over. Tutorials are all around the mighty Internet. People devote their time and passion to sharing their knowledge. To us. For free. We can never be thankful enough to them.
Nobody is going to complain about anything given out for free, but sometimes you just stumble upon what could be the perfect tutorial you’ve been waiting for and it happens to be flawed. What are the five capital sins of internet tutorials?
1. Knowledge jmp
Welcome to my “Assembly for beginners” tutorial!
Lesson 1
The CPU has three memory locations called “registers”. We refer to them as A, X, Y. To store the value “4” in register A, we write as follows:
LDA 4;Lesson 2
We can “mark” some parts of the code with labels. “Jumping” to a label is a powerful way to control the flow of our program. For instance, to jump to the label “loop” we write as follows:
JMP loop;Lesson 3
I’ve rewritten the Quake 3 engine in assembly. You can download the source code here. The code is nicely commented, so, whith the knowledge you have gathered so far, it should be easy to follow along. Happy coding!
2. Where on Earth is Concat String?
Jimmy from Alaska asked me how to concat strings. To concat two string together to obtain a third string that is the sum of the two, simply interleave string1 and string2 with a “plus” sign. What follows is an example. We are going to pull some astronomical data from a NASA webservice, analyze it and generate a 3D chart from the result. On line 1274 you can see how we concat two strings together to generate the url to call.
What the fuck. Sometimes I’m under the impression that the author of the tutorial is more interested in showing off his knowledge than to provide an actual answer. Examples should ideally be interesting, but sometimes
“Hello ” + “World”is more than enough to give an useful, real world usage example.
3. Soddy fod d cod
Video on YouTube starts
Hey guys, wassap? This is Aashish. It’s been a while since my last video, so… As always, sorry for my accent, as you know I’m Nepalese. Also, sorry for my voice, I got a cold while hicking on the Himalaya. Also, sorry for the sound quality, my yak chewed my microphone and I didn’t have time to buy a new one. Also, sorry for the video quality, my computer is broken and I’m recording this on my uncle’s Vic 20.
So, Aashish, thank you very much for your dedication, we appreciate it, but unless someone has put a gun on your head and is forcing you to record this video, why don’t you just wait a couple more days till your gear is ready to record an actual nice video and your cough is cleared up? Thank you, and get well soon.
4. I was born in a warm spring morning in 1987
You just discovered a new exciting framework and this guy has made a set of 27 videos to explain it! Holy cow, this is amazing. That’s a lot of material there, it’s gonna be fun, let’s jump right into it!
Video 1 — Why this guide
Video 2 —Who I am
Video 3 —What you are going to learn
Video 4 — How this guide is structured
Video 5 — What you will need
Video 6 — Required knowledge
Video 7 — Who should follow this guide
Video 8 — What are the advantages of this framework
Video 9 — JUST SHOW ME THE FUCKING CODE ALRIGHT?!
5. Tell, don’t show
One of the most frequent and useful advice that aspiring novel writers receive is “Show, don’t tell”. This means that it’s better not to explicitly say what a character is thinking, for example, but let the reader infer it by describing her actions.
Now, no matter how complicate is the program that you are writing, software development is an iterative process. Maybe you’re coding a Photoshop rip-off that will eventually have thousands of features, but you must start humble, with an empty window that just says “Prontoshop”. You then procede by adding the smallest feature (like making the window resizable), check that it works correctly, and go on to the following micro-step.
I’ve seen a lot of YouTube tutorials, some really well done, where the author keeps coding, adding feature, explaining what’s going on, but without clicking on the goddam “run” button once! I’m an inventive person, but why on Earth should I ever imagine what the program would eventually do in each step if you can simply show me that?!
Bonus: Just as if you were in the room
If you organize a conference and plan to record and share it on the net, keep in mind that you’re working for 20 people in the room and thosands of people on internet. Nothing is more frustrating that a speaker talking about something that you’re supposed to be seeing on a slide that is off screen or blurry and unreadable.
