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Sure, there's better sites out there, but sometimes you just have to trust the Google.
If the site shows up #1 for 90% of web stuff you're looking for, then others obviously found it useful too.
I suspect that sources like W3Schools, the O'Reilly Missing Manual series and DirectXTutorial.com leave out good practices to avoid overwhelming the reader. This idea is sometimes called Wittgenstein's ladder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children - "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps…
I agree with everything but the last bit. If you throw away the ladder, doesn't that represent forgetting the information that actually helped you?
Yeah, how dare we as developers criticise a website disseminating wrong information like W3Schools. It's not their fault they get tonnes of Google traffic and have made no effort whatsoever to bring their site inline with other equally great resources. The first Google result for the query, "div tag" is a W3Schools page. The page then cringefully displays a sample piece of code with an inline style colour attribute t…
If Hacker News participants ran the world no one would care about history. We can discuss things that happened in the past. It sure as hell sparked discussion here.
> "Don't get me wrong, as a developer I think W3Schools can serve a purpose..."
And it does. It's easy to understand, which is not something you find often in sites trying to teach something. As I said elsewhere, good code makes crappy tutorials since it introduces more concepts that can confuse and overwhelm a inexperienced reader.
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I agree with everything but the last bit. If you throw away the ladder, doesn't that represent forgetting the information that actually helped you?
No, you're still on top of the mountain, you just no longer need the rungs.
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I came out of it just fine. Satan had some good contacts.
That's the problem though, people who have been misled by w3schools often don't even realise it.
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C'mon. Their "PHP MySQL Insert Into" tutorial ( http://w3schools.com/php/php_mysql_insert.asp ) uses direct $_POST data with no escaping. No mention of security is made in the entire "PHP Database" section. These tutorials need a massive red flashing warning saying "we've left critical stuff out, you will get your site defaced if you code like this". Newbies don't need to be expected to know good code. That's no excu…
Good code makes crappy tutorials. If I was a moron, I don't care if the examples inadvertently summons swarms of locusts if I understand them quickly. Now, I would be all for W3Schools making their disclaimer more noticeable. It is there, though.
An unproductive comment, but I think it's a defensible one.
Except w3schools isn't approachable and it isn't for beginners. It's jargon loaded and filled with a bunch of information that means nothing to beginners. Let's look the page for explaining 'div': http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_div.asp "The tag defines a division or a section in an HTML document. The tag is used to group block-elements to format them with styles." Oh, I get it. Its for grouping block-elements(??)…
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I highly recommend http://dochub.io/ over w3schools. Not only does it source MDN, which is much more accurate, but it allows you to instantly search for whatever CSS property or JS function/object you're looking for. (The only thing that I find disadvantageous is that you have to know the name of what you're looking for)
Is there a similar site that is less Firefox-specific?
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> Good code makes crappy tutorials. Not necessarily, and bad code can make dangerous tutorials.
> "Not necessarily, and bad code can make dangerous tutorials." W3Schools is not responsible for what devs do, and safe code means introducing more concepts that can leave the scope of a tutorial. I agree the code sucks, but we're talking about minimizing time to understand something, not security. Save that for the security tutorials.
Following that tutorial introduces massive security holes into a site. Those security problems need to be discussed. At the very least they need a warning saying "Don't do this until you understand the security issues discussed in THIS OTHER GUIDE".
W3Fools energy would be _MUCH_ better spent on developing an alternative.