Buy books or free online tutorials?

Conway

New Member
Is it me, or does anyone else find these free online coding tutorials hard to follow?… u know the ones that teach how to code up a psd design into a working html & css file,
For one thing, they seem very rushed and I often find the people that write them provide very vague descriptions when explaining each step which often leaves me very frustrated when trying to fill in the gaps in my mind, going back and forth over the tutorial and finding, even though I have followed the tutorial step by step, what I produce almost never works which often leaves me very frustrated.


The trouble is, these designers that write these tutorials seem to think they can simply take off there designers hat and replace it with a teaching cap, well I’m afraid to say it’s not quite as a simple as that, teaching a process that the author may well be familiar with, in this case (converting a psd into a working html and css design) is a complicated process and unfortunatly a lot of them overlook this fact and end up producing a glossed over tutorial which is ridiculosing hard to follow and very unhelpful.



*A message for all web designers that participate in writing these tutorials - teaching is a skilled profession that has to be learn t like any other profession. if your going to participate in writing these tutorials make sure you explain each step clearly and don't assume just because you can easily understand it, that everyone else will, cause they won't and often, can't.



So my advice is this, any other designers that need to learn how to code websites is this, go buy and invest in some of the web design books found on amazon, you'll know which are the best ones to buy by reading the customer reviews, it may mean you forking out a bit of cash for now but least you will learn the correct way from the start in a well explained manner, rather than being left frustrated and time wasted from free online tutorials. they are free for a reason, because they are rubbish!!!!



Anyone else had a similarly frustrating experience trying to follow these free online tutorials? or ones from a design magazine like computer arts, which are equally bad!!!
if so please comment..........
 
There is definatly a lot of tutorials around the web but obviously its all about the website you are viewing. A good example I can give is a tutorial I followed on the web about some CSS issues. The website was totally useless to me so I asked around on here. Harry then gave me a link to his site Home — CSS Wizardry — CSS, Web Standards, Typography, Grids and now HTML5 which was pretty damn good! Its all about were you look and if you ever have any doubt about a website then you should always come and ask here about it. There are a lot of people who know the best places on the web for tutorials etc.

As for books wel they are great too! They are really handy too have, I must admit that I am always buying books from ebay, sitepoint, amazon, basically anywhere I can get my hands on. The biggest problem with books (Especially Web Development ones) is that they go out of date really fast, but they are always there for reference. I also realy enjoy a good read of a magazine, again depending one which ones you buy really does matter. Does this help? I hope so, if you have any questions just let us know, thanks for reading hope you get some more response.
 
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