What Makes A Programming Tutorial/lesson Good?

[rob86 2]

I've read a lot of programming lessons online, and a few books (this doesn't mean I completed the lessons in all of them.. I have a hard time keeping focused on one thing) and I seem to be drawn to certain ones. I found that I like a colorful lesson. It seems to keep my attention more and make things more memorable. This means colorful syntax highlighting for example. It seems to lighten up the dreary mood of reading a bunch of technical stuff. Complete black and white is a negative point for me. I think that's what makes unix man pages so boring.I like examples, who doesn't? A lesson without examples is in my opinion, a bad one. Examples make things a lot easier and could arguably be the most important part. I also like mini - projects, exercises, or simple questions. They give me a chance to apply the knowledge I learned. In some not so great lessons, they teach something, and neglect to give an example of how it's really used, expecting it to be obvious to a newbie. I'm often left wondering, "Okay, what good is it?". Being guided to use the new skills in a real program makes things make more sense.I don't like that a lot of lessons with exercises don't contain answers. It's always nice to be able to check out the solution to something that doesn't make sense to you yet.Depending on the language, I often like simplicity. I tried a few web lessons and one book on web-based languages like CSS and HTML, which wrote entire paragraphs on simple things. It made it look impossible to learn. It was an entire text book on HTML and CSS, very intimidating. I stumbled upon w3schools and the information was so brief but clear with examples I could experiment with, that it made learning all of those languages very easy. What a difference the presentation can make. Obviously, a more difficult language might need a little more explanation than a quick syntax + example, but a lot don't. Another thing I like is a lesson that tells you what to do after the lesson is finished (assuming there is more to know). I was learning C++, having great success with the lessons, finished the book and I was left wondering what I was supposed to do. Sure, I could make a text adventure game, or a math solver, but I had no idea how to make anything in a GUI. I had no guidance, a google search left me confused and overwhelmed, and I got disillusioned with the whole thing and completely forgot about C++ and programming for a while. Well, those are a few of my likes and dislikes.

[k_nitin_r 8]

Hi Rob86!Thank you for sharing your views about the programming tutorials and lessons that you've come across.When I come across lessons or tutorials and they are simple to understand, it doesn't usually matter for me whether there are colors, videos, or examples. The colors, videos, and examples are in good lessons and tutorials, but just the presence of them doesn't really mean that the lesson or tutorial is good. Microsoft makes several training videos but some of them are just way too basic and although they do involve examples, they aren't interesting because they explain so much more than what they really need to cover.I guess what is considered a good lesson or tutorial is subjective - some people find some tutorials easier while others find the same tutorials difficult to understand.Anyway, I guess you could post a couple of links that you came across for C++ GUI development. I worked on creating tutorials for GUI development in C++ a long long time ago, but that was just for the Windows platform and it wasn't very detailed.More from me later.