As of today, 69% of developers are self taught. In that journey, they may have signed or enrolled to many courses. Every developer do this, you may still be doing that. Every new month, you may be watching new project tutorials. You may seem enjoying them but soon you will realize that you are in a tutorial hell, repeatedly doing the same thing- watching tutorials again and again.
What is Tutorial Hell ?
Tutorial Hell is a stage when you continuously watch tutorials one after the other and feel like you are learning a lot of things and making so many projects with those tutorials. In this case when it comes to making projects on your own, you get stuck in something and you get disheartened and you start watching another tutorial and it goes on and on. Tutorial hell stops you improving your problem solving skills.
But don't feel bad about it, every developer has faced that in their journey.
How to escape Tutorial Hell
Before making a proper strategy of how to escape from the tutorial hell. You first need to think of why you are in the tutorial hell. You plan a project, you start working on it and somewhere in between you get stuck and instead of trying to solve that on your own, you start watching another tutorial and as I have said above it's a never ending process. You will always stuck in the project here or there, you have to face that.
Instead of going back to another tutorial, here are some ways you can do to get out of the tutorial hell.
Start with small projects
Starting with quite large and difficult projects will definitely lead you to tutorial hell. It will demotivate you, you may lose your will power and may lost track on what you are doing. Instead start with small projects and then build on those learnings.
Practice a lot before starting projects
The only way to know what you learn is practicing. What you should do is while learning a concept, you can do 3-4 coding exercises and a coding challenge to make sure you have understood those concepts. If you are facing difficulty doing those exercises or the challenge, you may revise those concepts and do that problem again.
Google is your best friend
Ok, it may seems odd but one thing that definitely will help you out in escaping the tutorial hell is getting good at googling. You may practice a lot but those exercises are limited. Every programming language has vast documentation which you couldn't get to learn from tutorials and coding exercise only.
While making projects you may encounter many problems which you will see first time but don't feel discouraged, everybody face that, instead search for those in google. You will definitely find the solution of your problem in Stackoverflow, Reddit or many other websites including the language documentation. It will also definitely improve your problem solving skills.
Talk with others about that problem
You may also discuss the problem with your friends, colleagues or teachers. Solving problems in groups is a lot more fun and it may help you provide more than one solution for a problem. Moreover they can help you approach your project in a more creative ways.
Conclusion
I hope you found this article helpful and will approach tutorials in a different and more effective manner.
Happy coding!
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