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Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

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31–40 of 93 posts

Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

#31

I’m just a student but I would love some content around how to get started with serverless. Also comparing and contrasting different front end or UI frameworks and what you’ve seen that’s worked well or poorly at scale.

Fireship.io goes over these things superficially (in a good sense)

Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

#32
I would be glad to find an integrated guide on how to build a state-of-the-art website and how to deploy/maintain it on a server like AWS or DigitalOcean.

I mean, I'm not interested in a html/css/javascript tutorial, we have enough resources on that. What I found really missing on the internet (maybe I'm not that good at searching), is a step-by-step detailed guide on how to deploy/update/maintain a website. An unordered list of thing that came up to my mind:

- How to deploy the website on a server

- Which server should one use

- How to expose it on the internet (buy domain name)

- Version control and hosting the repository (GitHub vs gitlab vs ...)

- Updating your website (CI/CD like Jenkins?)

- Reproducible environments (Docker?)

- How to integrate analytics

- How to integrate ads respectfully (of your users)

- How to integrate paying contents

- How to address security

- Ho to address scalability

Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

#33

I would be glad to find an integrated guide on how to build a state-of-the-art website and how to deploy/maintain it on a server like AWS or DigitalOcean. I mean, I'm not interested in a html/css/javascript tutorial, we have enough resources on that. What I found really missing on the internet (maybe I'm not that good at searching), is a step-by-step detailed guide on how to deploy/update/maintain a website. An unord…

For me, it would be great if the tutorial can focus on minimising the amount of work required to maintain or update the site while still retaining flexibility.

Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

#34

I would be glad to find an integrated guide on how to build a state-of-the-art website and how to deploy/maintain it on a server like AWS or DigitalOcean. I mean, I'm not interested in a html/css/javascript tutorial, we have enough resources on that. What I found really missing on the internet (maybe I'm not that good at searching), is a step-by-step detailed guide on how to deploy/update/maintain a website. An unord…

Yes to all but these three that seem out of place:

- How to integrate analytics

- How to integrate ads respectfully (of your users)

- How to integrate paying contents

Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

#35

"How to read an error message." This would help countless people new to development. Lots of systems (I'm looking at you, Java) throw up vast splats of tracebacks. Others chunder out great chunks of poorly digested code. Sometimes daunting even for experienced people. An article with basic advice about looking for the one or two useful lines in error messages would be great.

In my experience (teaching university students), few of the people who need such an article most would read it, or even go looking for it. Maybe some experienced people might, but most of those will figure it out for themselves.

I think most beginner programmers treat every error message as simply "you screwed up", and reading the error message and gleaning useful information from it doesn't occur to them as a possibility. That knowledge can come from it being explained like you suggest (but in person with their actual problem is better), or from them sitting down and puzzling it out. If you haven't been through this though, and don't know what kind of information is available in error messages, you won't go looking for an explanation of how to find it.

Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

#36
There's metric tons of tutorials that would benefit a lot by delving beyond "Getting started" and the obligatory Hello World construct, to dealing with implementing a more real-world use case, and showcasing the various best-practices to the language / lib / framework along the way.

So many projects list a gazillion features on their site, and then leave you with a "Good luck! The features are in the code base".

Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

#37

I would be glad to find an integrated guide on how to build a state-of-the-art website and how to deploy/maintain it on a server like AWS or DigitalOcean. I mean, I'm not interested in a html/css/javascript tutorial, we have enough resources on that. What I found really missing on the internet (maybe I'm not that good at searching), is a step-by-step detailed guide on how to deploy/update/maintain a website. An unord…

Unfortunately much of the answers, and in fact your questions are transient, they will become outdated fairly quickly - or are not necessary even now for arbitrary "websites". The tooling for web development has become overly complex and we are now starting the trend back down to the basics instigated by projects such as esbuild.

If you aren't familiar with any of this stuff, i'd recommend focusing on the fundamentals (HTML, CSS, JS), avoiding CI/CD at all cost, avoiding complex back-ends that require fragile docker containers to ever work. Get familiar with the basics of running a simple static web server and simply upload your files via rsync. Then start approaching dynamic backend runtimes, php, nodejs (with caution). The reason I recommend this approach is that much of the complex tooling and environments you will no doubt encounter in tutorials is extremely opaque, they can provide you a giant leg up to get up and running with something impressive, but will give you very little insight into how or why.

From this point on everything gets opinionated and project specific... which is why it's hard to write a timeless and comprehensive guide.

Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

#39
post #9

What I would find interesting is a page which lists all steps to be performed on the command line to create a web application from scratch. Say we start with a fresh Debian install, the first line might be apt update && apt upgrade The second line might be apt install php Or Python or Node. And then the commands to create the project directory, switching to it, installing a webserver etc would follow. At some point t…

I want to work on this . This is interesting.

Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

#40
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there are so many of these tutorials. The problem is that a person who wants to learn React generally does not care about Debian and something like apt update && apt install nginx . Then depending on who's writing the tutorial, the content ranges from "create a VM and issue these commands" to gcloud commands to spawn VMs. Usually, when a student doesn't know anything about React, they won't know anything…

The difference to the other tutorials is that this one would not have prerequisites in terms of tools and services. It would not require anything but to copy+paste lines to go along. And that the format of shell commands makes the different approaches very easily compareable. And reproducable. You can put all of the commands into a script and have your own automated template to start new projects. A single Docker con…

On the other hand , a tutorial like this needs to be actively maintained as packages come and go . It’s essentially a documentation
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