Get The Most Out of Programming Tutorials

Learning any skill takes a lot of time and dedication. Programming isn’t any different. There are tons of different things to learn when learning programming that it can seem overwhelming to decide what you want to learn. So, you may decide that you want to learn web development. Great! You find a tutorial on web development, get a few lessons in, and then get distracted by another tutorial that you found online for Python. So, you decide to do a few lessons in Python. For a lot of people, this cycle sticks around and they don’t actually learn. I want to talk about a few tips that I learned during my time that may help you get the most out of tutorials.

Don’t Try To Learn Everything

One person cannot possibly learn everything. It is best to try to figure out a specialty that you want to tackle and focus on that. Do you want to learn web development, mobile development, machine learning? No matter your focus, it is best to stick to one focus at a time. Trying to learn web development and machine learning at the same time will likely just lead you to burnout or failure. Especially, since those two specialities typically use entirely different languages/tools. Just stick to one specialty and one or two tutorials at a time.

Know Why You’re Using The Tutorial

You may think that this point is really silly, but a lot of people don’t actually have a goal in mind when they are deciding on a tutorial. Let’s say you want to learn web development. So, you go on Udemy, search through the tutorials for one on web development and pick the top result. This is incredibly common. You may pick that tutorial because it has the most reviews/students, but you don’t even know what the tutorial is trying to accomplish. Picking a tutorial because it has a high amount of reviews doesn’t mean that you will enjoy the material or that it will be beneficial for you. (I’m not trying to say that the top result is bad, but it is very important to have a goal in mind).

If your goal is to learn how to create a web site, it may be better to learn some of the common technologies used and search for a tutorial/book that will help with that. This same principle applies to any specialty. Research some of the best technologies before just generalizing a tutorial.

Avoid Cramming

Cramming the material into one sitting will be pointless, for most people. For the majority of people, your memory will take time to synthesize the material. Cramming everything in one sitting may seem like you learned a lot really quickly, but you will likely forget most of what you learned within a few days. Our memory works well with progressive exposure to something over time for the material to be ingrained into our minds. One tutorial will not teach you everything you need to know about any speciality. Tutorials will just advance your knowledge in a particular subject. Expect to need multiple tutorials or documentation to learn the entirety of a language/framework.

I would suggest to take your time to go through the material. Take Action (mentioned later) during the tutorial(s) and appreciate the journey. The destination will come as long as you appreciate the journey.

Complete The Tutorial

You might think this is a joke, but there are a lot of people that start tutorials and don’t finish them. Think of how many things you may have started in your life and didn’t finish. Just finishing the tutorial could be a huge dopamine rush that may lead you into more research into the topic or even realizing that the topic isn’t for you. However, if you cut it short because of something silly (Didn’t like the teacher, the tutorial was too slow/fast), you may be cutting yourself short of a great opportunity.

Take Action — Don’t Be Passive

Now that you decided on a specialty and one or two tutorials to focus on, it’s time to actually learn how to be an effective learner.

Reasonable Schedule

The first step would be to create a reasonable schedule. Now, your schedule will certainly be different from anyone elses and that is okay! Having a schedule that works for you will give you more motivation to stick to it. If you aren’t a morning person, but you try to make yourself program in the morning, you probably won’t be successful. I’ve heard a lot of stories of people that have a full-time job and a family, but they want to learn programming. So, they will program at night after their family goes to sleep. This may work for some people, but for others (myself included), you may be too exhausted to actually focus on what you are doing. You may be better off waking up earlier to do a little bit in the morning than staying up late.

Everybody’s situation is different so, create a schedule that works best for you and your situation.

Note Taking

With your schedule all ready, you sit down at your computer and fire up that first tutorial. Now, it’s time to take some notes. I have written a previous blog post about note taking for Software Engineers that I would recommend. Taking notes will help you retain the information that you are reading. Notes allow you to type the code out and explain it in your own words. This helps retention by actually typing the code and by explaining the code to yourself.

Code Along/Building Projects

Taking notes is important for many reasons, but actually coding along and building your own projects is very effective. Not all tutorials have exercises to actually complete, but you can code along in your own IDE/browser and experiment with the code. Most importantly, create your own projects/apps with the code that you learn. Even if you only know the basics of a language, you can still create a small project with just a basic loop. Just build projects. I cannot emphasize it enough.

Don’t Be Afraid To Fail/Ask Questions

Building projects is one of the most important parts to getting the most out of tutorials and learning, but your own mental status is significantly more important. Don’t beat yourself up over not being able to do something simple or even failing over something simple. Most full-time developers learn how to become a better programmer by failing. Errors/bugs are extremely common in coding and happen all of the time. In fact, IDEs were made to be able to write code easier, but also give you information about your errors/bugs. Utilize the features of your IDE for debugging if you are running into errors while learning.

If you can’t figure something out, don’t be afraid to use the internet. With tons of resources being open-source, you may be surprised at how many people probably have had the same error as you before. Utilize that and ask questions. If you cannot find an answer by searching your error, don’t be afraid to use resources like Stack Overflow to ask your question. There are thousands of developers out there willing to help you learn!