Finding Good Information. Tutorials

The hardest part of learning anything to do with coding on the Web is finding good information. There are some excellent sites that give some exemplary tutorials. My favorite of these is Tizag.com.

The trouble with these sites is that the tutorials stay at a fairly basic level. They are full of good information on things like basic database manipulation. But if you want to do something a little more complicated like combine several conditions in a search query on your database then they are of less use.

The people that can be of real help with more advanced stuff have been doing it for so long that they have forgotten what it is like to be a beginner. So what happens is that really good information gets lost in a haze of technical jargon. Any tutorials written for the more complex assume a reasonable level of technical ability in the user.

The biggest problem however is that people who write tutorials on advanced topics seem to all, without exception be lazy. None of them comment their code properly. What really annoys me is a lack of comments after closing brackets or closing divs. Trying to figure out the code then involves lots and lots of scrolling up and down looking for the beginning and end of if statements and loops. To make matters worse, the code is usually not properly indented either.

So learn this people. You are wasting your time writing a tutorial if you don't do it properly. The only people who can understand your code are people that could have written it anyway. . . . . even then they will probably have a hard time following it.