Being from the “show-me” state, I learn best by doing, failing, researching, redoing, and eventually succeeding. Online tutorials have been an essential part of my progress in coding. However with each of these tutorials things are not always what they seem.

I thought as my first post on my blog I would go over “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” of online tutorials.

Good:

• Some very generous people have donated their time and effort to give us access to all these great resources for FREE!
• “Monkey See, Monkey Do” If you like to learn “hands on” these are invaluable.
• Often in the process of trying to get these older apps to work, you learn much about debugging and researching problems.

Bad:

• Unbeknownst to some, many of these tutorials were done years ago. Things change, versions are updated and often the code does not translate to current versions.
• Some are better than others on proper coding techniques, while others might teach methods that are not really proper or supported anymore.

Ugly:

• Much time can be spent in tracking down why the app is not working. If you are in a study progam of some kind this can take much of your valuable time.

Overall I am grateful these resources are available to me and being a part of the Open Source community is awesome! Your time and abilities are your only limits to achieving your goals!

In the past when I’ve worked exclusively in a platform (like Lotus Notes) all the training materials were expensive.

All Hail Open Source!