Beginner Coding Resources and the Curious Case of the Cliff

One of the most amazing things about learning to code is that there are so many resources out there!  You will want to do them all and you will want to complete them all, I know that's how I feel/felt.  That said, all resources are not created equally, even if they all often bill themselves as being beginner friendly.

I have found that there is a curious learning curve in beginner resources including Pine's Learn to Program, Code Academy, and the TreeHouse Rails track I just took.  The curve, or cliff as I call it, usually happens around 75% of the way through the resource.  Whereas they will spend inordinate amounts of time explaining the most simple of tasks early on, there comes a point where things start racing and zooming and explanation is at a premium.  Terms, language, and sophistication pick up at a rapid pace and you (the beginner) begin to feel like a total jackass which should not be the pedagogical goal.

In the case of Pine, he has you knee deep in problems that his previous 75 pages simply do not prepare you for.  In the case of the Rails track on TreeHouse, Seifer seems to start in the middle of an intermediate course on test based design and literally races through making an example app.  One of the things I realize this field needs is a guide to the guides.  Many of these resources that have "cliffs" are probably not that bad for the intermediate, but for the true beginner, they are absolutely demoralizing.  In fact, spending 15 hours building up to a Ruby tutorial that did not end up working out for me has left me pretty salty about the whole thing.  It's called the Rails track and that's the one thing that is not explained in any kind of detail!  I love the points, the interface, and the teachers, but in the end, it did not help me learn rails.  I learned many thing leading up to this, but at the end of the day, the course fell short.

Where do I go from here?  I think I am going to try to scale back to more Ruby programming fundamentals, finish up Shaw's book, take the Ruby course in TreeHouse, and then get into a new book I have discovered which draws rave reviews from beginner by Daniel Kehoe entitled learn Ruby on Rails.

Frustrated but not defeated!