Once I heard that a good book on any programming language cannot be short, so the number of pages is the first criterium when choosing a tutorial.
The statement was half a joke, but it has some truth in it. There are tens and hundreds of books available for most popular programming languages, frameworks and technologies, and it is hard to choose one. So that dummy condition is the first one to check.
Are there any criteria to help choose the “right” tutorials? What is the first (or probably the second) thing to pay attention on when choosing a technical tutorial?
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There are various metrics that can be helpful:
- Does the resource make absurd promises? If the title is “Learn X in Y days”, it is probably crap.
- Does the community of that technology maintain an index of especially good (or bad) resources? It is worth listening to such opinions.
- Is the author well known in that field? If so, this can be a positive indicator, but be aware that brilliant people aren’t necessarily good teachers.
- Is the layout and formatting of that resource professional and geared towards easy understanding? I shit you not, I have seen language tutorials that don’t even use code indenting. If a website looks like it’s from the 90s, there is a chance the content may not be up to date either.
- If there are many orthographic and grammatical errors then the resource probably wasn’t reviewed. On the other hand, the content may be excellent, but the author just isn’t a native speaker.
- Does the resource ignore or embrace best practices of that technology? Does it use deprecated functionality? Of course, these questions can only be answered when you already know that technology.
- How old is the resource? Best practices evolve constantly. Some resources have a timeless quality, but more often anything > 5 years old will be out of date in some respect. This is a proxy indicator for the previous point, not an absolute rule.
I think that instead of searching for tutorials and buying book, reading language specification is your best shot at gaining a complete understanding of that language.
For example:
- C# http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=7029
- EcmaScript http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-262.htm
The same goes for understanding certain technologies. I know dozens of web developers who have never read HTTP1.1 specification (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2616)
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I look for:
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The ones that build programming languages obviously have the information and a vested interest and sometimes publish books.
- For example, If it’s C, then look for the authors Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.
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If it’s a Microsoft programming language such as C#, look for books by Microsoft.
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Well known publication houses. For example, I generally like the O’Reilly books.
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Sites like codeacademy.com and khanacademy.org.
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