Had a talk with my neighbor about learning to code and it hit me hard

My neighbor Bob is a 55 year old mechanic who's never written a line of code. Last weekend he told me he tried a Python tutorial for 2 weeks and quit because he felt dumb. But then he said something that stuck with me: 'I can rebuild a transmission from scratch but this makes me feel like I can't learn anything.' It really hit me that tutorials are designed by people who already know the stuff. They skip the baby steps we actually need. How do you guys deal with that feeling of being stuck when a tutorial expects you to know something you haven't learned yet?

2 comments

2 Comments

mark36111d agoMost Upvoted

Saw a great point somewhere that coding tutorials are like trying to learn a language from a dictionary. They throw terms and concepts at you without building a foundation. Your neighbor is a smart guy, rebuilding a transmission is serious problem solving. It's the tutorial's fault, not his. Maybe check out some of those beginner friendly courses that start from absolute zero, like CS50 from Harvard or free stuff on YouTube.

black.pat11d ago

Yeah I read somewhere that most coding tutorials skip the boring but important stuff because they assume you already know basic logic or terminology. It's like teaching someone to bake a cake but never explaining what flour is.