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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Beginners are the target audience for tutorials. Many tutorials are written in gobbledygook. See Microsoft documentation, which would've instead said GDG, and assumed you knew what GDG was.
If they had the same skill level and knowledge then they wouldn't need a tutorial to begin with.
And that's precisely the problem with the vast majority of tutorials.
Microsoft: Now all you have to do is add in a GDG
Now imagine reading Mircosoft documentation and not being able to find anything which explains what GDG is. Classic "rest of Owl".
No they're not. You include what the pre-requisite knowlege is, along with links to resources about the pre-requisite knowledge. See Creating MAUI UI's in C#
No, most of the time they're not. And you don't need to warn me that an "s" is coming.
Note that I said "approximately", not the identical level of skill and knowledge. It's written by a fooblorts developer who uses migwed and ghai and is now looking to connect suwdo with ugfest. If you're also a fooblorts developer who wants to connect suwdo with ugfest but you have no experience with that particular thing, then the tutorial is for you. It's not for someone who has never used any of those technologies and doesn't understand anything about them.
Ah, I can see you never write tutorials, nevermind then. You have no idea what you're talking about.
No idea what you're talking about.
In other words, you are a beginner with that particular thing.
It might be if that is what they are needing to learn. Reading tutorials is usually needs-driven. Think inheriting legacy code
You know that's what tutorials are for in the first place, right?
Ah, I can see you've never written any good tutorials
Says someone who just said someone with no experience at something is somehow not a beginner with it 😂
Beginners. It's a plural, there's no need for the apostrophe.
There's a difference between "a beginner" and "someone who is very experienced but hasn't done X". The post was about a "non-developer", not a "developer who understands and uses 90% of the same tech stack, but is looking to do something new related to it".
If it were aimed at true beginners it would be written completely differently. A university teacher preparing a lecture about shakespeare doesn't write the same lecture if their audience is a bunch of 5 year olds.
You know that's not true, right?
Ok, I fixed the typo.
If they haven't done X then they are a beginner at doing X - no difference - this is in fact the target audience for many tutorials. The other things which aren't covered in the tutorial you put in the pre-requisites.
and yet, a lot of tutorials written for developers who have used 90% of it are written just as badly, hence the huge upvotes.
That's the point! Many tutorials need to be written completely differently! 😂 For starters all of the ones at Microsoft.
That's because the course has pre-requisites that you must have passed before you can enrol in that course - if you don't, then you have to go study those things before you'll be allowed to enrol - and they are explicitly spelt out in the guide to enrolling, hence the professor can write the lecture safe in the knowledge that all students in his class have completed all of the necessary pre-requisites.
I know it's absolutely true. Even my threads on Maths are written with the assumption that the reader doesn't know all of the background knowledge (in fact are written quite intentionally for those who are being bullied by gaslighters, and they lack the proof to debunk them).