The Problem newb Software Development Tutorials
As a person that has spent a lot of time on my own to learn software development, and pretty much anything beyond school, I have often seen that there is a HUGE lack of resources for the beginners. While there is some it isn’t very good at all, sorry. I have spent the last couple of years trying to learn C# and ASP.NET and only through hand holding of teachers and long exhaustive talks with people that know A LOT more than I do, have I been able to learn.
This to me shows one of two things that trouble me.
- The people that write content for beginners don’t know how to write content for beginners.
- The learning curve is EXTREMELY high for programming.
Personally, I think it is a mix between both. As some people get more advanced as developers they tend to talk and meet with people that know as much or more than them as developers and they start to grow. When this happens people tend to forget what it is like to be a beginner and try to throw to much at them at once without any thorough explanation at all.
This brings me to the point of my post. I plan to start doing more “technical” blogging about subjects I am learning in programming, but my goal is to write it so those that are beginners, much like I still am, will understand what is going on. This means no one line code snippets, but full methods/functions to long detailed explanations. These I believe add value and make things easier. Here is an example of what I mean code wise.
Instead of comparing a string to null or “” just use the String.IsNullOrEmpty(stringVariable); method. ( I have seen this and dismissed it because I don’t get it )
This is what I would do for a post or an explanation
Acceptable code:
if(var==null||var==“”)
DoSomething();
Better code:
if(String.IsNullOrEmpty(var))
DoSomething();
As you can see this will demonstrate through straight code what people usually do, then showing with full code what can be better to do. This however assumes you understand how you can use if statements with bools.
