Does it make sense to write tutorial when content of the tutorial can be already learned from internet without that tutorial?

Question

For example, does it makes sense to write tutorial called Best Intellij shortcuts. You can already find so many shortcuts online in many places. If the answer is "There is no need for new article since many of them already exist" then why there is tons of tutorials how @Autowired annotation works? If you google for "spring @Autowired" you will find a lot of materials about how that annotation works, some written in back in 2012. and some of them in 2019 and they are almost totally the same. Also, I am sure that even before all of those articles that information was available in spring documentation. I think that the value of that new tutorial would be to highlight the best ten annotations.

Answer 1

Well, I'd suggest you should, for a couple big reasons:

1. Most people who are learning jump between resources and look for good ones. I often tell people who are learning something that if they're stuck and nothing makes sense, to try a different resource. It is just as often the fault of the resource as the person. For this reason, it is to learner's advantage to have lots of different resources they can try out there. Some like videos. Some think bullet list articles are great. Others want to sit down in a course. The internet caters to all of those choices.

2. As admirable as your goal of teaching others is, this should be just as much for yourself - indeed, one of the best ways of learning is teaching. Explaining something solidifies that understanding in your own mind.

3. It is good to learn how to convey your ideas - how to write well. I guarantee you that if you keep writing articles like this, you'll look back at the first one years later and see how far your writing style has come.

Answer 2

Note: I'm conflating teacher/mentor in the answer as it applies to both, albeit to slightly different degrees.

A teacher's ability to teach directly derives from their understanding of the material they're teaching. When I say "material", that also includes the teacher resources.

Does that mean you're not allowed to use existing materials? Of course not. But if you rewrite it, you learn it, and when you learn it, you tend to know it better than if you just linked to a resource that you didn't write. It's not a requirement, but it will generally improve the quality of both your teacher's resource and your ability as a teacher.

That being said, especially for software development, I find it very valuable to sometimes give students a URL to highlight the fact that this information can be found online. Similarly, rather than answer a question, I might give them a google query which I suspect will have the answer in the top results.

There is value to teaching students to find things themselves, but this is not a good starting point when your students are total newcomers. It's more effective to first guide them and selectively feed them information, and when they are comfortable with the basics, to then teach them how to learn about new things by looking them up.

If you google for "spring @Autowired" you will find a lot of materials about how that annotation works, some written in back in 2012. and some of them in 2019 and they are almost totally the same

As a simple analogy, if I'm googling to find a list of the best mobile games, I will include the current year specifically to ensure that the list I get is current. Similarly, your tutorial writers are going to make current adaptations, which may be the same (if nothing changed) or not (if things have evolved).

If you're thinking to yourself that "the 2019 article should only list the new things", that would mean that a new student needs to look up the 2019 article, the 2018 article, the 2017 article, ... and so on until the initial release of the subject matter. That's not a great resource for a beginner, especially if e.g. "new in 2017" features were later supplanted by "new in 2019" features.

As a technical example, think about how hard it would be to understand a code file by only seeing its initial add to version control and the diffs that have occured since then. Wouldn't you much prefer to just see the file "as is" today?

Instead, when tailored to beginners, the 2019 article should be a comprehensive list of information that a beginner can base themselves on.

There's a vast difference between articles tailored to beginners and experts. Your expectations of "no repetition" in articles only works for experts who already know the parts that would otherwise be repeated.
Beginners, however, don't want these parts to be omitted because they don't yet know them (to them, it's not repeated content).

If you only publish incremental articles, then the effort to enter a field as a beginner increases as a technology becomes older (because you'd need to parse more and more incremental tutorials).

Instead, it makes more sense to regularly do a "current state of the technology" article which explains the entire ecosystem (current to the period of publishing), and these are the tutorials you are referring to.

does it makes sense to write tutorial called Best Intellij shortcuts

Specifically for shorcuts (and similar), these things often end up being used as a cheat sheet, which means that it's much more valuable to have a list of all (relevant) shortcuts as opposed to only the new ones.

I would like to create a community of inexperienced developers(with < 2 years of experience) so I can offer them mentorship.

If we extend the "why more than one tutorial" premise of the question, why would you want to mentor people when they can already find tutorials online?

Extending it even further, why do schools even have teachers when the students already have the school books in their possesions?

The answer to that question, much like the answer to the premise of your posted question, is that guidance is a personalized trajectory, and an online article cannot adapt itself based on a student's understanding. Letting students figure it out for themselves, while not technically impossible, is going to throw students in the deep end (being unable to separate beginner and advanced topics creates a lot of confusion).

For example, I can tell them to read about SOLID principles or design patterns and then if they don't understand clearly I can help them.

It seems like you are taking the "throw them in the deep end" approach, and plan to only teach them when they struggle in the deep end. That's not a judgment, just an observation. It's a valid teaching technique (as a student this is exactly what works best for me).

Using that approach, it makes sense to rely more on existing articles than to manually rewrite them, as your immediate focus is on autodidactism, as this immediately teaches the student to find their own resources.