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Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

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

#182
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He does have absolute mastery, but it's my favorite tutorial because it is an _excellent tutorial_. I can do 2 chickens in a minute at this point; more, if I don't bone out the legs. Just as importantly: if you can do this with a chicken, you can do it with a pheasant, a duck, or a goose as well. It works pretty much the same way. If you eat chicken, I strongly encourage you to try this yourself.

Dave Arnold mentioned this week that Pepin claimed 12 seconds as his personal best; 30 seconds for a non-professional cook seems extremely impressive.

Oh, nice, it's been awhile since I listened, and now I have a reason to.

Pepin is doubtless doing a much better job than I am, and I'm not counting the time to clean up the tenderloins, which is a pain in the ass.

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

#183
post #102

Hartl's Rails tutorial. Probably the best intro to modern full stack development I've ever come across. https://www.railstutorial.org/book

As a beginner trying to learn to program a long time ago, rails was possibly the worst resource I attempted to use. You follow a complicated, tutorial to set everything up so you can actually start. Then you type a few words and then a bunch of complicated looking files are generated automatically in a way that it's hard for a beginner to even know what sections he's supposed to be able to understand. Maybe it clicks…

I tend to agree with the notion that diving into rails is a difficult way to learn when you start from little or nothing.

The core issue is that Rails can do so much to help you out, which allows you to stumble your way through many issues and make things that do mostly work. While this is great for getting things done quickly at first, you might develop incorrect notions of where the abstraction layers' boundaries are which can make life difficult when you step outside of the box.

Now that's not to say you can't learn that way, or that tutorials couldn't be written that effectively teach using rails. It's just that there are dangers in learning first from a complete and robust framework that does such a good job of masking the complexity it encapsulates.

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

#184
post #110

https://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/pyramid-blogr/en/lat... - because I wrote it. I've found that newcomers struggle with many concepts during presentations so I wrote my own tutorial for beginners. On many meetups and hackathons I've noticed people break their environments or Linux installations. It's a bit much but we try to start from scratch showcasing how to use venv to get things going and create a small ap…

FYI the first link is broken. https://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/pyramid-blogr/en/lat...

Thanks, looks like I pasted something incorrectly while over phone :( It is working now - maybe someone edited it?

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

#185

Hartl's Rails tutorial. Probably the best intro to modern full stack development I've ever come across. https://www.railstutorial.org/book

10+ years ago I also found great joy in Why's Poignant Guide To Ruby ( https://poignant.guide/ )

My favourite.

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

#187

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 SQ…

This is a great tutorial thank you! I did not expect an emotional dataset of Texas executions and their last words..

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dave Arnold mentioned this week that Pepin claimed 12 seconds as his personal best; 30 seconds for a non-professional cook seems extremely impressive.

Oh, nice, it's been awhile since I listened, and now I have a reason to. Pepin is doubtless doing a much better job than I am, and I'm not counting the time to clean up the tenderloins, which is a pain in the ass.

Arnold's in the middle of a move and has to thin out his book collection as a result. As he tries to figure out what to keep he's been bringing in books to talk about in a new segment called "Classics in the field". If you've enjoyed Dave Arnold talking at length about obscure decades-old highly in-depth technical books, well he's doing that every week now.

I'm very happy that he's saved me the trouble of having to read "Pigeons: How to Make Them Pay"

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

#190

Agree with the Django Girls tutorial in OP. I ran into them at Pycon and expressed my appreciation for helping me learn Django. Was really exciting stuff. Does anyone happen to have a good resource for learning GoLang? It's nearly impossible to find good tutorials (outside of the golang site's tutorial) because the name Go is super common and "GoLang" isn't used by everyone.

Check out: "Learn Go the Complete Bootcamp" course. It teaches Go step by step with easy to understand animations, and 1000+ exercises: https://www.udemy.com/learn-go-the-complete-bootcamp-course-...

This is my blog: https://blog.learngoprogramming.com

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