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Why You Should be Doing More Copy-Paste Tutorials
And how to move past them
Programming tutorials are a complicated matter. If you’re learning how to program, inevitably you’re going to come across a point where you have to just copy someone’s code. This is a dangerous activity, and if you don’t do it correctly then you won’t learn.
Recently I’ve been trying to get a better handle on the MERN tech stack (MongoDB, ExpressJS, React, and Node). My approach was to try to get a vision of what a finished product might look like. There are plenty of finished examples on the internet — if you look around on Github you can find more published projects than you can shake a stick at. But if you’re just starting from scratch then the experience can be insanely intimidating.
MERN is a technology stack, but aside from it’s four main components, you’ll also find common organizational techniques. If you’re just diving into programming and all you have seen up to this point is single file programs or programs that just have index.html, main.js, and style.css pages, then looking through something that has multiple folders and multiple pages interacting in different ways is overwhelming.
This is where a tutorial comes in. A good two-hour video tutorial showing you how the code works step-by-step, along with actually writing along with…
