Category: Tutorial

Tutorials are lessons that take the reader by the hand through a series of steps to complete a project of some kind. They are what your project needs in order to show a beginner that they can achieve something with it.

They are wholly learning-oriented, and specifically, they are oriented towards learning how rather than learning that.

You are the teacher, and you are responsible for what the student will do. Under your instruction, the student will execute a series of actions to achieve some end.

The end and the actions are up to you, but deciding what they should be can be hard work. The end has to be meaningful, but also achievable for a complete beginner.

Consider an analogy of teaching a child to cook.

What you teach the child to cook isn’t really important. What’s important is that the child finds it enjoyable, and gains confidence, and wants to do it again.

Through the things the child does, it will learn important things about cooking. It will learn what it is like to be in the kitchen, to use the utensils, to handle the food.

This is because using software, like cooking, is a matter of craft. It’s knowledge - but it is practical knowledge, not theoretical knowledge. When we learn a new craft or skill, we always begin learning it by doing.

The important thing is that having done the tutorial, the learner is in a position to make sense of the rest of the documentation, and the software itself.

The difference to the Cookbook is that with a tutorial you cannot assume previous knowledge about the subject and the steps should always be reproducible.