Switched from watching YouTube tutorials to actually reading the docs and it changed everything

For my first six months learning Python, I only watched YouTube tutorials. I thought reading documentation was for people who already knew what they were doing. Then I got stuck on a basic Flask app last month and spent three hours watching videos that didn't solve my problem. Finally I opened the official Flask docs and found the answer in ten minutes. The docs told me exactly what parameters a function takes and what it returns. Now I start with the docs first and only use videos for high level concepts. Has anyone else wasted time on tutorial hell before realizing the docs are actually simpler?

3 comments

3 Comments

taylor.sean1mo ago

It was the same for me with JavaScript. I spent weeks watching people build React apps on video and thought I was learning. Then I tried to build something on my own and nothing worked right. I opened the React docs and found a whole page explaining exactly how state and props work, something no video had ever clearly laid out. Now I read the docs for the nuts and bolts and use videos just to see what a finished project might look like. The docs are written by the people who built the thing, so they tell you exactly how it works. Videos just show you one person's way of doing it, which might not match your situation at all.

robert_bell1mo ago

Same thing happened to me with Python actually. I watched like 15 hours of someone building Django apps and felt prepared. Then I tried to set up a simple database model and spent an entire afternoon fighting errors. Turned out the docs had a three sentence explanation that would have saved me all that time. I still watch videos for inspiration but I treat them like a movie trailer, not the actual instruction manual.

elizabeths511mo ago

Oh man, this is exactly what happened to me with learning how to use the Requests library. I watched three different videos trying to figure out how to pass headers and parameters and ended up copy-pasting code that barely worked. Then I looked at the Requests docs and it literally has a table showing every parameter with examples, took me two minutes to get it working perfectly. Tutorials are great for getting excited about something, but the docs are where the actual answers live.