You could add links to the other chapters at the beginning of each article. This way it will be much easier for readers to navigate through the series.
Show HN: My C# Tutorial Series: Coding Basics. How am I doing so far?
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: Show HN: My C# Tutorial Series: Coding Basics. How am I doing so far?
#12Why take all the pain of creating/editing screenshots, explaining through an article? You could have made a video instead. I personally prefer videos to articles when it comes to learning something -new-.
I really hate videos to learn programming...I have to wait for you to write everything when I just want to see a little part but I don't know when it happens, most don't add the code to copypaste and generally I think it's harder to learn from videos.
Re: Show HN: My C# Tutorial Series: Coding Basics. How am I doing so far?
#13Why take all the pain of creating/editing screenshots, explaining through an article? You could have made a video instead. I personally prefer videos to articles when it comes to learning something -new-.
I probably like them better because, I started off with kevin skoglund's php essential training. And, he was really good at explaining things.
Also, I found the discussion on this post[1] strikingly relevant in this context.
[1] - http://jaap.haitsma.org/2010/01/03/the-rise-of-video-tutoria...
Re: Show HN: My C# Tutorial Series: Coding Basics. How am I doing so far?
#14You've made a couple of interesting decisions (that I may not have done if I were writing this myself):
* Picking CSC over Visual Studio for compiling initially * Explaining namespaces thoroughly in part 2, then glossing over them in 3 (I also don't know if I entirely agree with what's under "Using Statement")
No major criticisms with structure/style/order. I find that when teaching a programming language you just wind up dumping information on the person learning until a point where everything clicks, so the order of explaining this stuff probably isn't that important.
One thing that I'd suggest fixing is the indentation on the code. The number of spaces being inconsistent is something that could massively throw off people who don't understand nesting. Other than this, it's a good set of tutorials so far IMO.
Re: Show HN: My C# Tutorial Series: Coding Basics. How am I doing so far?
#15Why take all the pain of creating/editing screenshots, explaining through an article? You could have made a video instead. I personally prefer videos to articles when it comes to learning something -new-.
I absolutely hate tutorial videos. Not that anything is wrong with them, I just like text more.
Re: Show HN: My C# Tutorial Series: Coding Basics. How am I doing so far?
#16What's your target audience?
It seems too verbose for programmers and too specific to a toolset for those who are just starting out.
Re: Show HN: My C# Tutorial Series: Coding Basics. How am I doing so far?
#17Great start Jeremy, I've read the entirety of chapter 3 and skimmed chapter 1, you have a solid foundation.
However, I have a few, hopefully constructive, critiques:
(1) As mentioned by qwerty69, links to the other chapters would help a great deal.
(2) Your target audience is "newbies"? If that's the case, it makes sense that you would provide a little more explanation for critical concepts such as variables. In chapter 3, specifically, it feels as if you gloss over the topic by deeming it a "a space to put data." Maybe you're just looking for your audience to build an intuitive notion of the concept, but annecdotally I've always enjoyed learning the essential details when tackling new topics.
(3) Speak authoritatively; don't inject fluff into your sentences. It drains mental capacity. For some examples:
"You just press that button and it will compile and run your program. Or you can just press F5 and that will do the same thing" ==> "Press that button, or F5, to compile and run your program."
"The new method Console.ReadLine() is pretty self explanatory, it reads a line of text from the console" ==> "Console.ReadLine() reads a line of text from the console."
Concise, to the point, and much more effective. I prefer reading books that explain the most in the least words possible.
Either way, keep up the good work. The more resources budding programmers have access to, the better!
Re: Show HN: My C# Tutorial Series: Coding Basics. How am I doing so far?
#18My background: C# pays for my family, my wife is constantly jumping on and off random tutorials to learn some programming (interested in C# because of my dayjob and Python as a nice beginner's language with lots of learning resources).
If I look at this article I feel that the flow is missing. It is well written, has nice screen shots and explains a lot. But it seems to hop around a lot. I don't quite know who you're targeting, but I'm reasonably sure you'd confuse the hell out of my (intelligent, brilliant) wife.
The style is more documentation slash dissection of stuff, less introduction with a purpose. I miss a global "why", you provide more like "This is something we can do, let's walk through it together". Unless you're already a programmer or really into case studies like this, I think this way to present something is less accessible.
Don't want to bash on your work. I think what you did here looks nice. Just sharing why I don't think I'd subscribe or why I cannot recommend the series to my so.
Re: Show HN: My C# Tutorial Series: Coding Basics. How am I doing so far?
#19FYI
>> Using Statement - Defines the scope for your application’s objects and disposes them when they’re done. This isn’t super important now, but I’m going to cover some other ways we can implement using statements in C#. What you need to know now is it’s including the types in the System namespace in your scope so you can use them.
This is entirely wrong. The 'using' in your example is the using directive, not the using statement. They are entirely unrelated.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/sf0df423(v=vs.80).as... - using directive http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/yh598w02(v=vs.80).as... - using statement
Also, I really don't see why you are focussing on using the command line to compile programs. This is really not user friendly. The possibility for mistake is very high, which will certainly throw the target user of his/her tracks.
Re: Show HN: My C# Tutorial Series: Coding Basics. How am I doing so far?
#20Probably a minor point but it seems your screenshots all show Visual Studio rather than one of the express editions?
This might be the best tool for the job, but IIRC VS has a non-trivial price tag which a beginner might not be willing to spend.