Tutorials Done My Way

Part of the great love that I have for the technology industry is just how willing people are to help each other, evidenced by the plethora of tutorials out there on just about any and every subject. Entire websites are devoted to answering any question that may be asked (think stackoverflow.com). Twitter has various different feeds that answer technical questions for a variety of products, and people troll these feeds and provide almost real-time answers.

But my major problem with online help is just how shoddy, piecemeal, and incomplete almost all of it is. Want to know how to connect to a server remotely? There is a tutorial for that, but what if that server is not typical? Then you are HOSED! Though this is a relatively minor example, and one that isn't actually all that hard, it nevertheless illustrates the gaping hole found in most tutorials in that they don't explain the underlying structure of the tutorial and so moving outside of that tutorial can be near impossible for the newbie (which, if you are looking up tutorials in the first place, you almost certainly are).

So here is my deal: I want to do online tutorials and documentations in a more excellent manor. I realize that some people don't want an explanation behind what is going on in the tutorial, they just want to know how it is done. That is fine, most of those people can either look elsewhere or just skip over the meaningful explanations I hope to provide.

In addition to go deeper in my tutorials, I also want to provide explanations in layman's terms so that anyone can read them and understand what is going on. That will mean that some technical folks will not appreciate my writing style or may possibly think it is condescending. It is not my intent to condescend, but rather to write to a level that I know from much experience will be beneficial to many others. Too often technical writers assume that the user is a technical person, making the explanation inaccessible to those not advanced enough for the writing.

My aims in the different tutorials that I will write and publish is to share what knowledge I have gained along my way to technical understanding, and to hopefully do so in a maximally accessible way. Feel free to comment/share/take any and all code/resources/material posted. It is free and I want it to stay that way. If you want to cite me, that is fine, but I really don't care. Just try and help a fellow newb out along the way.