If no one creates tutorials or even update old workshops i still enjoy to do it myself even it means grabbing and collecting codes from the AUM and forum and try to use them.
So when i use
a code and i see on screen its working then it's oke with me at least it does what i want
When i see the mails i get and the downloads of my workshops and tutorials i know it helps people even if my code is shitty
There are multiple issues here that I think are worth highlighting. And these are general issues I see very very often, not just something with you personally.
You say that you are helping people and you take that from feedback from people who objectively
can't judge how good or bad your code is. Obviously you are not writing tutorials for experienced programmers who can take the context of what they already know and apply it to the new things they learn. This is dangerous, because you are not properly teaching anyone here. If you hack code together for yourself, that's one thing, but actively going out and teaching people wrong things is highly dangerous.
And I mean that very substantial stuff is very much wrong. I don't expect you to make a beginner tutorial that explains when and how to use double-ended queues vs arrays or when to roll the hash tables out, this is advanced stuff. But what you are failing to do is actually properly teaching people what tools are at their disposal and how to effectively use them.
And that is the reason you don't see many tutorials around. Because writing a good tutorial is incredibly hard to get right. Simply putting some code in front of people and describing what it does is not enough. If I take you by your hand, walk up to a car and then say "well, it works by burning dinosaurs that propels it forwards" and then somehow think that eventually you will become a mechanic because of that. Heck, it's not even technically right, because only a marginal part of oil comes from dinosaurs, the most part is dead plant matter.
Of course, not everyone wants to become a top coder, some just want to fuck around and have fun. That's all fine, but how are they supposed to do that? Back to my analogy, I just told you that liquid dinos make a car go vroom, now I give you a set of car thingies and soldering iron and tell you to go nuts. Worst case scenario is that you kill yourself, luckily when writing programs that can't happen (yet). But you may very well destroy the fun people are having and turn them away from programming, because you don't actually teach them how to work with the things they got at hand.
You put a bunch of technically wrong code with sparse and often wrong comments (yes, I actually read your tutorials before I wrote this) in front of people and call it a day. And I'm sorry, that's simply not a tutorial. Programming is complex and hard, let's face it and teaching people wrong knowledge that they have to forget and then correctly learn later isn't going to help the pain for anyone.
An example, your for() loop: It's simply wrong and whatever you think it does, I promise you it doesn't actually do that. And you don't explain how the semantics of a for loop work, you just put technically wrong code in front of people and tell them "that's what it does". Granted, for loops aren't supposed to be the scope of a physics tutorial, but you don't explain that in any other earlier beginner tutorial either, so yeah...
Of course, properly explaining a for loop requires that the user actually knows what an expression is, because a for loop uses them to do the "right" thing. Again, nowhere in your tutorials is explained what an expression in C actually is and how they evaluate. Why? Is that too boring? Sorry, programming is composed to at least some degree of dry theory that is an absolute MUST. Not saying that everyone has to be theoretical computer engineer to do programming, but yeah, there is a basic set of knowledge that
has to be present.
The big issue is that people who often times have no idea what they are doing, are the same people who are most willing to help beginners out. Why though? Because people with knowledge have no interest in spoon feeding everything to others. I personally am more than happy to give pointers in the right direction to help people help their problems, but most beginners can't do anything with that. And I have neither the interest nor the time to write full fledged posts to actually get them to the point where they can do something with a proper answer. Fuck, I'd wager that 80% of this forum don't even know how memory works or that floating point arithmetic is non associative. Basic stuff when working with C.
The long story short is, while your intentions are good, you are ultimately doing more harm than good with your tutorials. And again, beginners can't objectively judge your tutorials quality in any way, they simply lack the knowledge for that, so whatever they have to say about is, is more or less meaningless.
I should have known that... that's why it's good people take the time to answer. I will dive right into it.
