Programming Practice Vs. Programming Tutorials

I love tutorials.  I especially love tutorials that give me points and badges.  This is one of the reasons why I will do an exercise every day on Code Academy despite the fact that I have long ago given up on it as a great resource for me to learn code.  I have moved on to TreeHouse which I really love.  However, is there a time when tutorials hinder more than help?

Tutorials are wonderful for a number of reasons.  You are always making progress, you are always learning new things, and there are a number of built in confidence boosters.  Even if you are not understanding as I experienced with the Rails course, you are still getting points and moving along!  However, if you are not careful, you will end up knee deep in the tutorials and stunting your progress.

One of the dangers of hanging out in the tutorials is that you can become very reliant on their environments, forums, and constant positive feedback.  When you work on your own, you don't get any badges and some of the problems you face may take hours to solve.  You may fail to solve some of them or there may not be a solution at all!  You have to search high and low to find what you need and it is rare when the answers are in any kind of easily digestible format.

However, making your own programs is the goal!  Yesterday I was buoyed by my creation of a very simple program which simply takes information I input and processes it into a usable format.  As a professor every semester we need to take a series of archaic numbers and turn them into averages.  Now, I have a program that will do it for me!  It made use of my work with loops, but there are still more improvements I want to make.  That said, it was very gratifying to help solve a real world problem with my programming knowledge.  It is also empowering to make something on your own without a friendly face (who you are paying for) guiding you every step of the way.

Am I going to stop using tutorials?  Of course not!  However, I am going to work on getting out of them more often so I can refocus on the task at hand: making programs on my own.  Even though I ran into a host of problems making my little program, it was so empowering to solve them based on my own research!


Resources in Progress:
Total hours into Programming: 114 (3 since last time )
Days into Programming/Hours per day: 2.5 Hours Per Day (Goal:3.0)

Progress on Shaw's Learning Ruby the Hard Way: Finished Exercise 1-13

My Text game: 3 hours, 118 lines

TreeHouse (3637 Points, 42 Badges)

Code Academy Points: (753 points, 79 badges)

Progress on Hartl's Tutorial Ready to start Chapter 3! 

Progress on Gaddis' Starting out with Python: Done With Chapter 1, Appendix A,B

Resources Finished:

Josh Kemp's No Degree, No Problem 8/14/2015

Chris Pine's Learn to Program 8/9/2015

Created a Program for Teaching Evals 9/6/2015

TreeHouse Make a Website Track 8/17/2015

TreeHouse Ruby Basics 8/20/2015
TreeHouse JavaScript Basics 8/22/2015
TreeHouse Console Foundations 8/24/2015 
TreeHouse Git Basics 8/25/2015
TreeHouse Installing a Ruby Environment 8/26/2015
TreeHouse Making a ToDo Rails App 8/31/15
TreeHouse Ruby Logical Operators 9/4/2015
TreeHouse Ruby Collections 9/5/2015
TreeHouse Loops 9/6/2015

Code Academy Make a Website Course 7/29/2015

Code Academy Ruby Course 8/5/2015

Code Academy HTML and CSS Course 8/24/2015