Please stop treating coding tutorials as the best way to learn programming
A terminal displaying 'Hello World' with a holographic globe and some binary code in the background.
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | vectorfusionart/Shutterstock
Follow

Like
9
Add us on
Link copied to clipboard
4
By
Patrick Campanale
3 days ago

Are you stuck in the coding tutorial loop? I used to be, but I realized that tutorials were actually holding me back when it came to my programming. Here’s how I realized coding tutorials were setting me up for failure, and how I fixed it.

✕
Remove Ads

HTG Wrapped Full Calendar - December 24
HTG Wrapped 2025: 24 days of tech
4
By
Will Verduzco
Coding tutorials often teach you simple, cookie-cutter techniques
Tutorials are a good starting point, but that’s where they end.

A computer monitor displaying code, with a purple and blue background and stylized angular bracket symbols floating around.
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | guteksk7/Shutterstock
I can’t tell you how many tutorials I’ve done over the years. From coding to CAD, woodworking, 3D printing, there are tutorials for almost everything. The problem with tutorials is that they only teach you very specific tasks. If you’re trying to learn to program a button, then you can find dozens of tutorials on that. Most tutorials on programming a button only cover the basics of the button, but not much more.

I typically only stick to coding tutorials for the absolute basics, and then try to move onto other types of projects as fast as possible. Basic web development tutorials will easily teach me that every HTML file has to have at the top of the page, for instance. However, basic HTML tutorials won’t teach you how to build a complex web page.

✕
Remove Ads

Illustration of an IDE with multiple lines of code and some websites in the background.
RELATED
11 Tips for Getting Started With Modern CSS
By
Bobby Jack
Doing just tutorials doesn't teach you as much as doing real projects
I’ve always learned more from doing real projects.

programming illustration
Credit: Shutterstock/whiteMocca
When I first started learning programming, I looked for all the tutorials I could find. I did all the basic ones, but those ran out pretty quick. Then, I was left trying to figure out what to do next. I would come up with a project idea, and I couldn’t find a tutorial on it—then I’d get stuck in this loop.

Eventually, I realized that hand-holding tutorials only got me so far, and I actually needed to learn the basics instead of just walking through someone else’s code. With tutorials, you can sometimes get caught in the copy and paste trap. Taking someone else’s code, copying it into your IDE, and then running it.

✕
Remove Ads

Whenever you just copy and paste code without actually dissecting it to understand it, you likely won’t pick up on the core concepts that the tutorial was trying to cover. It took me a while to get out of “tutorial only” mode and into “doing real projects” mode, but it was the best thing that happened to me for development. My coding instantly got better, and I was able to do a wider variety of projects because I was no longer limited to what I could find a copy and paste tutorial for.

Closeup of a computer screen showing lines of programming language.
RELATED
Interested in Coding? Here's a Beginner's Guide to Picking a Programming Language
By
Jason Dookeran
You will rarely fail when doing a tutorial, And that's the problem
Succeeding every time is for losers…and tutorial users.

lca_hero
Once I stopped copying and pasting code from others, something interesting happened—my builds started failing more often. When using code from others, the code is almost always going to work well unless dependencies have majorly changed since the tutorial was written. This is because tutorial writers want you to have a good experience with their tutorials, so they make sure the code works.

✕
Remove Ads

Since tutorials rarely fail, they rarely teach more than just the written code on the screen. Your code works, but do you know why it works? Why does the button react the way that it does when you click it? How does it know what web page to open? Some links open in a new window and others open in the current window? How come?

These are questions that can often be left unanswered even if the tutorial explains them, because you’re simply copying and pasting code. Failure is a necessary part of learning, and many tutorials remove the boundary of failure.

Python logo over blurred Python code background, with the word 'Python' written in yellow underneath.
RELATED
5 Python Errors Explained (And How to Fix Them)
By
Zunaid Ali
Failure is the best teacher you'll have
Failure is half the fun.

Woman coding on a laptop in front of a desktop monitor with lines of code, overlaid with programming symbols and icons for Org-Roam, Neovim, and GitHub.
Once I started getting away from cookie-cutter tutorials and diving more into writing my own code, things started to fail much more frequently. This meant I had to figure out what the problem was.

✕
Remove Ads

Now, with modern AI tools, researching code issues is a lot easier than it used to be. But, unless you’re simply having the AI write for you and blindly copying and pasting its output, you can still use it to learn.

When your code fails, try to dissect it. Look at what the error log says, and then try to figure out why it failed. Was there a missing comma (my arch nemesis), maybe a misspelled function? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to type something like buttonPress only to type buttonpress or Buttonpress or even buttonPRess because my finger held the shift key too long. Those types of typos will always make your code fail, and if you’re just using tutorials, you’ll never experiment with them.

How-To Geek Report
Unlock your tech-savvy potential and master the digital world with How-To Geek.
Subscribe
✕
Remove Ads

I remember one time many years ago when I was writing an app for the webOS platform, I forgot a comma in a file that had thousands of lines of code in it. It was a nightmare to figure out why there was an error, and I had such terrible internet at the time that I was doing most of my programming offline, which meant I didn’t have online validators to use.

Once I started letting myself fail when coding, I learned so much more and could write better code at the end of it. Failure truly is the best teacher.

Some IDEs side by side with question marks around them.
RELATED
This IDE Actually Made Me a Better Programmer
20
By
JT McGinty
I recently picked up Arduino and microcontroller programming. I did maybe two or three tutorials, and then started just saying, “I want it to do X, Y, and Z…how do I do that?” and just trying different things, failing, and figuring it out until it worked. This taught me far more than watching a 50+ video tutorial series ever would have.

Don’t get me wrong, coding tutorials are a fantastic place to start to learn programming. I have done my fair share of tutorials, but that’s only the very beginning of my journey now. I now move onto real-world projects as soon as I possibly can.