I completely agree with him, the best tutorials I've ever had for languages were ones that had me make something I might use.
My first experiences were in c++ and that had me making little games in the command line. I eventually took it upon myself to write an implementation of conway's game of life once I learnt about 2d-arrays and realised I could use two of them to make it.
Visual studio 2010 has a very nice set of tutorials that I found really great for learning c# with.
The first was just a program that had 3 buttons (open, clear and close) and a picture box. It just opened an image and displayed it.
It was a really nice tutorial that was fun, taught fast and inspired me to make the first program that I actually use on my desktop. It's a pretty basic slideshow program, but I've never found one that fitted what I wanted and the tutorial gave me all the tools I needed to create it with, nothing more.
That tutorial made me sit for a weekend and write that program.
The feeling of finally having a program that did what I wanted and the fact that I made it just added an extra level of joy.
It really showed to me why programming is enjoyable.
The quality of a tutorial for an absolute beginner can make or break their motivation to ever try again. It's far too important to not do well.
My first experiences were in c++ and that had me making little games in the command line. I eventually took it upon myself to write an implementation of conway's game of life once I learnt about 2d-arrays and realised I could use two of them to make it.
Visual studio 2010 has a very nice set of tutorials that I found really great for learning c# with. The first was just a program that had 3 buttons (open, clear and close) and a picture box. It just opened an image and displayed it. It was a really nice tutorial that was fun, taught fast and inspired me to make the first program that I actually use on my desktop. It's a pretty basic slideshow program, but I've never found one that fitted what I wanted and the tutorial gave me all the tools I needed to create it with, nothing more.
That tutorial made me sit for a weekend and write that program. The feeling of finally having a program that did what I wanted and the fact that I made it just added an extra level of joy. It really showed to me why programming is enjoyable.
The quality of a tutorial for an absolute beginner can make or break their motivation to ever try again. It's far too important to not do well.