
Being an instructor at both Lynda/Linkedin Learning and O'Reilly , I constantly have conversations with the content folks at both these companies. So I'm asking this question to get some feedback from the field with developers/designers. What subjects you feel aren't covered enough?
Chief Technology Officer at BedRock4
I would say: History. And I don't mean giving one or two examples during a full computer science course. I mean a full course on History. Important figures from the past who had an impact on technology. Like Augusta Ada King, who was in a way, already thinking of how to write computer programs. I would say the most valuable things what we can learn from history are "What they did" and especially "Why they did what they did". Imagine you would like to master a programming language. I would say one of the key factors is not knowing how to program, but knowing how it actually works. Underwater. Why the language was done in this way (e.g. performance, structural) and not many of the other ways?. Who where the people behind the language? What was their life like? What choices did they make and why? What could they have done better? There are plenty of sources online to find this out yourself, but it demands a lot of time. Having a course on this regarding the most fundamental topics has a lot of value for a developer. As a developer you want to reach the point of saying: Ask my anything about my field of expertise. I know it all.
Something which shows how to built a project from all phases of software development and how to maintain it. As most of the tutorial are like using x language make a todo app, but they dont provide any information on how to make app step by step or making algos to tackle each problem, they just start coding.
oh!
A year ago I was trying to learn a bit of vue.js.
I know HTML, CSS, and a bit of JS. No previous libraries/frameworks experience. Also rarely used a terminal and all the stuff it's used for such as task runners and bundlers and all that stuff. I've been mostly developing sites using WordPress, so my set up has always been quite simple.
The hardest thing I found when trying to learn Vue, was understanding the big picture. All the tutorial went straight to the smaller things, making it very hard to understand why things were done the way they were, or even why or when I should use a framework in the first place.
I was wishing I could find a tutorial that would simply explain what MVC, MVVM, routers, templates, etc. were in a simple way for those who have never done anything which such a set up before. Not focused on any particular technology and no details. Only the basics of such setups/ ecosystems seen from the bigger picture, that can apply that all the frameworks.
There may be such tutorials/courses by now, but I haven't found one on Lynda yet.
Ryosuke
Designer / Developer / Influencer