When I started my career as a professional developer, I used to watch a lot of tutorials and thus most of my time used to spend on either by reading about it or watching the video. I used to watch the tutorial in record time and thus after completing that I start doing another one and thus it was a never stopping process. I think this is happening for each of us, whether we a developer or in any other fields, we thing watching tutorials is helping us.
PC: Pixabay.com
The definition of Tutorial Hell is that stage where we are actually completing a lot of tutorials without actually making any meaningful progress. Like you can complete these tutorials CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Angular, NgRx and so on in like 3 months without actually learning anything. The problem with this approach is that we never actually learn anything because we are not implementing what we are learning and thus the information is not sticking into our head, it's just like reading the book of weight loss without doing any exercise. When you start writing code, you will be easily lost because you actually don't know where to start with. This is a never-ending cycle -> finish a tutorial, try something -> you are not sure what you are doing -> finish another tutorial.
And usually, junior developers fall under this category because we want to be at par with the senior developer by learning everything at a very short time. Also, there are a lot of tutorials on Youtube which will make you learn a programming language in 5 hours, to make tutorial hell quite familiar for everyone. It takes years of practice to master one programming language if you practice it every single day, and thus that's why it's always good to get the basics from tutorials but you will learn only when you start implementing it. We should learn that we are not ready just by viewing tutorials until and unless we actually work on it.
Tutorials are a fantastic way to get started. As of now, we are living in an information world where there is a tutorial for everything, like any programming language or there is StackOverflow to get your query sorted out in no time.
We have seen what exactly is Tutorial Hell but the question is how to escape from it. The easiest way to escape from Tutorial hell is to stop doing more tutorials and start building stuff, i.e. write actual code. The application can be small or big but you should build it, like an app which you need or a clone of the popular app. One more thing we can do is to replicate what tutorial has shown, every tutorial out there actually creates a demo app, we can take a reference from it and give our touch to it as a starting point. When you start doing it, you will be able to discover a lot of things which no tutorial can teach you. It is tiresome, but nothing is easy you know. We need to make things to learn and that's how people actually become a great developer because they write everyday something or the other.
PC: Pixabay.com
We should use the tutorial as a baseline to know the basics, it is not meant to replace the actual implementation. Just to give you an example, I wanted to build my applications on Angular, so I have taken Udemy's Angular - The Complete Guide (2020 Edition) and that's it. Once I completed the tutorial, I started developing stuff and thus when I was stuck, either I will go back to the video or I will go through some articles and thus in this way I am not actually watching any more tutorial and thus implementing the stuff.
