My experience with learning almost any new language / framework / library goes like this:<p>1. There are plenty of beginner tutorials. Often they just go through the examples from the docs or show a very simple proof of concept. Not very useful if you can read the docs.<p>2. Then you are left on your own reading through uncommented GitHub repos to understand how to put these things actually into production for use cases that go beyond 'add a todo to this list'.<p>You almost never find tutorials on how to structure your application, best practices, common mistakes etc.<p>That's the knowledge that is really helpful though and that I would pay $$$ to learn. Not 'how to create a simple todo app'. Why are there barely any learning resources that target the intermediate level?
<a href="https://hi.hyperskill.org/" rel="nofollow">https://hi.hyperskill.org/</a>
^This might be a good place to learn the intermediate stuff. Python, Java, Kotlin.<p>More intermediate stuff goes into the data structures and algorithms.
<a href="https://sp19.datastructur.es/" rel="nofollow">https://sp19.datastructur.es/</a>
^UCB's Josh Hug is a good lecturer, also provides course textbook, hw, side projects.<p>For best practices, try to get the Head First Design Patterns PDF.<p>Common mistakes? Search for "Effective <whateverLanguage>" and you should find a PDF for whatever you're looking for.<p>Also, goalkicker.com has compiled a lot of intermediate stuff from scraping StackOverflow question-answers.
One theory of mine is there is far more self promotion in the developer community now than there was when I started. In particular javascript and web development juniors writing blog posts and dev.to articles as a form of self promotion. On the other end of the spectrum are domain experts who make video courses or books on advanced topics. In the intermediate level you have a big gap with not a whole lot of information available.
In addition to the good points mentioned by others:<p>1. Out of the total time spent in building an application, a non-significant amount of time is spent on boring tasks to make the application real world ready.
In some cases at least, you use third party libraries and custom developed components to do so.
Including those in a learning resource/tutorial will, at least in some cases, make the code exponentially more complex to absorb.<p>2. Some of the code you use for building production-ready applications is proprietary - either proprietary to the developer or to the company.<p>Sidenote: I would argue that we have an abundance of resources. What we don't have is that many laser focused "here are the 35 most common gotchas you will face while moving this to production and here is exactly what you need to do" type of resources.
Universities all have these kinds of intermediate courses: <a href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ckaestne/17313/2018/#schedule" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ckaestne/17313/2018/#schedule</a> is an example of general software architecture like how to identify requirements. Notice all the books on architecture and design being referenced as well. There's startup architecture courses floating around too: <a href="https://cmu-17-356.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://cmu-17-356.github.io/</a><p>For exploring some huge codebase where there is no design documentation one way is just to use a fancy ide and sabotage something to see what it breaks in your ide, then you can trace what code is relying on. Some open source projects have books written about their architecture, you could also start with those then everything you see there is often similar in undocumented projects in my experience, in terms of organization of code like where is the directory containing all the core functionality, where are the feature addons.
This is a need I'm hoping to address with my latest project, Semicolon&Sons. Basically I've built and maintained a web app business for the past ten years and can share a ton of war stories about how certain architectural decisions either paid off or bit me in the ass. Because I own the copyright to the code, there's no red tape stopping me from showing it on camera or whatever.<p>As regards educational content, I'm at an early stage with this, but I've got a couple of videos over on YouTube <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC17mJJnvzAa_e9qQqLIfIeQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC17mJJnvzAa_e9qQqLIfIeQ</a><p>As for your question as to why there are so few intermediate level learning resources, I think it's because the market size for intermediate stuff is much much smaller than it is for beginner resources and therefore content creators prefer to focus on the beginner stuff.
True. This didn’t seem to be the case 10 years ago.<p>Maybe this is the result of commercialization of information: much finer optimization of follower count inevitably leads to oversimplification and overselling. And experts are increasingly less motivated to share knowledge with non-experts, like in academia where clarity of explanation to outsiders is sometimes valued negatively.<p>Also, most of the useful beginner to intermediate level content is created in video format, and that’s just grossly inefficient for a busy person: you cannot quickly scan a video, and you need sound, and good understanding of spoken English (IME much harder than reading) so the barrier to learning is actually higher.<p>Also, there were blogs, and now there are mostly walled gardens. In many industries (e.g. I’m familiar with professional dog training) most information is there and is poorly accessible.<p>I’d like to hear other opinions too.
They are much more scattered through the web. There are more of such articles for devops and high load architecture, but some topics are well researched, for example Mozilla have published very thoughtful article about app localization: <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Localization/Web_Localizability/Creating_localizable_web_applications" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Localizatio...</a><p>Unfortunately, I can’t remember any source that is publishing such materials on regular basis, seems that this type of knowledge is tightly connected with exact company best practices and it takes a lot of work to make this knowledge useful for the general public.
I've been pondering and working on this exact problem for over 4 months. I agree with you. The amount of time that engineers spend at work to teach themselves, test or experiment with frameworks, libraries, architectures is really high. Personally I've spent hours of unproductive work before a breakthrough and certainly there's a component of the difficulty in searching, piecing together ideas that are not basic.<p>You mention video walkthroughs and that you would pay for something like this. I'd love to do a video call and chat to learn more: nirmalthacker@gmail.com
I think most of the intermediate to hard concepts, best practices, etc. are usually learned on the job as you run into problems and solve them. I would also guess that more of the advanced things tend to be on the backend. A todo list application front end built from a tutorial will likely scale for one user or thousands of concurrent users.<p>The other aspect of advanced is how to maintain an application and write it so its easier to maintain. Once something is live, how you get changes in, fix bugs, monitor, etc. is not really talked about online because it is boring. It is a combo of process, tooling and some tech.
At a certain point, it's more efficient to read the primary source of educational material, which is the documentation of whatever project/language you're working with. With some exceptions for complicated domains, it's usually much more efficient to read the docs rather than some tutorial that has probably drifted out of date. If you're interested in how other projects manage things, just read their code on github.
If you do Django, Two Scoops of Django is an excellent resource from going to begnnner/intermediate to intermediate-with-sytle / moving-to-expert. Unfortunately I found the same problem and wish there were more things at this level, especially with CSS for people who are 80% backend.<p>(Judging from your comment would I be correct in guessing that you are doing mainly JavaScript stuff? If you are, then the Python world is generally a lot nicer.)
Don't you think being left alone to search for intermediate knowledge teaches us a lot?
I agree intermediate-level resources are rare but that has helped me in growing as a software developer. On the contrary, if straightforward information were made available, then you would never grow.<p>-Just my thoughts.
I like textbooks for this. I can’t find them anymore for new things I’m interested in. For instance, there is no decent textbook on modern machine learning. Prior to 2014 they were great. Programming books in general seem way too narrow and quickly become obsolete.