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Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

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Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#1
What is your favourite (video or written) tutorial for beginners – in any technology?

Mine is Django Girls Tutorial (https://tutorial.djangogirls.org/en/) because it does not assume any prior knowledge and has a good balance between the big picture and small details.

Re: Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#3
post #2

http://learnyouahaskell.com is a fun and accessible intro to Haskell that's a great complement to denser material

Gladly there is an online IDE with compiler (https://repl.it/languages/haskell) so you don't even need to install Haskell locally (which honestly seemed a bit heavy for a starter's tutorial - "First you need Haskell Platform, then you can start the tutorial")

Re: Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#6
I asked this exact same question a while back as well, here's a link to that discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14985057

Glad to see Michael Hartl's book on rails was suggested here, that's what prompted me to post my thread.

As a summary of that thread:

drracket: http://docs.racket-lang.org/quick/index.html

VueJS: https://vuejs.org (not a tutorial)

freecodecamp

K&R

Laracasts

Re: Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#7
Jonathan Palardy 'Why Learn AWK' [1]. I'd tried to learn awk a few times but just couldn't grok it. This essay gave me a lightbulb moment.

Honourable mention to 'Automate the Boring Stuff with Python' [2], which does what not a lot of tutorials do - motivate programming for non-technical users.

[1] https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/why-learn-awk/

[2] https://automatetheboringstuff.com

Re: Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#8
https://selectstarsql.com - SQL tutorials for non-technical folks.

This is an interactive book which aims to be the best place on the internet for learning SQL. It is free of charge, free of ads and doesn't require registration or downloads. It helps you learn by running queries against a real-world dataset to complete projects of consequence. It is not a mere reference page — it conveys a mental model for writing SQL.

I expect little to no coding knowledge. Each chapter is designed to take about 30 minutes. As more of the world's data is stored in databases, I expect that this time will pay rich dividends!

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