…if you’re looking for information on an overly broad or specific topic.
Online tutorials can be a great source of information on a topic (they can also be terrible, as many are out-of-date, incomplete or written by unqualified people who shouldn’t be writing tutorials) especially if you’re just looking for a quick reference to get you started in a certain subject. A good tutorial — or even a bad one as long as you take it for what it is and do further research — gives you a foundation to build on by teaching you about a particular topic, usually by demonstrating one possible solution to the problem at hand.
This is both the strength and weakness of an online tutorial; it will usually cover a single approach to solving a problem, only in rare cases pointing you in the direction of resources to study alternatives. The single approach will hopefully be covered in detail and will allow you to very quickly get up and running. It will not however generally educate you particularly well on why the approach was chosen over possible alternatives and will very rarely go over weaknesses of the chosen method. It will also be entirely up to the reader to adapt the technique as necessary if they’re trying to achieve something slightly different from the covered subject. This has two consequences for those seeking tutorials:
- You’re unlikely to find a tutorial covering a broad topic, although you may in some cases find a series that attempts to do so. Tutorials cover a specific solution to a specific problem, so rather than looking for one that covers the entirety of your project (”building a house”, or “developing a multi-player game”) you will have better luck if you look for resources covering smaller steps involved in getting the project done (”building a brick wall”, or “creating a network connection”). If you really need a resource that covers a broad topic in detail then you’re almost certainly not looking for a tutorial; you should instead look for books or classes.
- You may not be able to find a tutorial covering exactly what you want to do, especially if the subject is particularly specific (”replacing the ink in <blah> model of printer”, or “animating a werewolf-shaman”). Instead you need to generalise your problem somewhat (”changing the ink in printers”, or “animating a character”) and then look for resources you can get started with; they won’t tell you exactly what to do, but they can give you a good starting point which you can then experiment from in order to solve your own problem.
Lastly, if you have managed to find a tutorial that covers the problem you’re trying to solve (or a similar one that you think can give you a good starting point) you should always check with other resources to see if there are alternative approaches that may be better suited to your particular case. You may well find that the first tutorial you found is completely incorrect, or is correct but that there is a much easier way to solve the problem. In some cases you might be better of with a book or a class in your local area.