

Ask HN: What are the most beautifully written tutorials for beginners? - mrtimo

5 years ago I spun up my first EC2 instance after reading the tutorial called &quot;EC2 for Poets&quot;. I have never forgotten how well it was written for an absolute beginner. What are the most beautifully written tutorials for absolute beginners across a variety of technical subjects (besides codeacademy - which is amazing)?
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thesilverbanger
As an absolute beginner, I actually feel qualified to contribute to a Hacker
News thread. Pardon my excitement! As to the question at hand, I have found
Zed A. Shaw's "Learn Python the Hard Way" e-book to be extremely helpful. As
far as I remember, it assumes no prior knowledge of programming and gets you
started right away on tutorials, opting to explain everything after you have
the given code up and running. It certainly helps to burn the syntax of a
given language into your brain through repetition and has ample amounts of
humor peppered throughout.

You'll find this book, as well as a number of other books in the series, all
freely available at the site:
[http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/](http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/)

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avni000
I'm really enjoying Canva's Design School tutorials that simply and elegantly
take complete beginners through the basics of good design with a series of
hands-on exercises.

[http://designschool.canva.com/tutorials/](http://designschool.canva.com/tutorials/)

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dfwf23rw
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

[http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-
guide/](http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/)

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partisan
Not sure about consolidated collections, but I found the Arc language tutorial
to be exactly what I want in a tutorial: concise yet providing good coverage
of the topic.

[http://www.arclanguage.org/tut.txt](http://www.arclanguage.org/tut.txt)

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swatow
Probably because the tutorials for beginners reach the most number of people
(because advanced users are more likely to self-learn or use documentation,
and because advanced topics are often specialized). Therefore there is the
most value in making a good beginners tutorial.

Also, a tutorial for beginners can be written by someone who isn't an expert,
but is a full or part-time professional writer or communicator. A tutorial for
experts must be written by other experts, who don't have the time to learn and
practice communications skills as much.

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hds
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good is a fantastic introduction to Haskell in
particular and functional programming in general. Definitely a great place to
start:

[http://learnyouahaskell.com](http://learnyouahaskell.com)

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hansy
[Ruby on Rails]
[https://www.railstutorial.org/](https://www.railstutorial.org/)

Without question this is the single best beginner resource for learning Ruby
on Rails I have ever come across. I tried CodeAcademy and a few other similar
websites, but just couldn't connect the dots. Michael Hartl does an
unbelievable job explaining web concepts in a simple, concise manner.

I can't recommend this resource enough.

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mrtimo
OP here. Thanks for all the great comments. This is becoming a good resource.
Here is a list of tutorials that I had my undergrad students do. Some are from
MSDNA...
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hNliZd6kp1YBfDKQucnK8cV0...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hNliZd6kp1YBfDKQucnK8cV0lf-
Qj3zU9esN3gf3UxY/edit?usp=sharing)

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stephenbez
I thought the Knockout tutorials were great:
[http://learn.knockoutjs.com/](http://learn.knockoutjs.com/)

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codewritinfool
The "Aviation Formulary" isn't really a tutorial, but it covers a ton of
groovy GIS stuff in a way I haven't seen collected anywhere else, with worked
examples.

[http://williams.best.vwh.net/avform.htm](http://williams.best.vwh.net/avform.htm)

A bit domain-specific, but fantastic.

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selbyk
Arch's Beginner Guide will introduce you to the Arch way step by step,
regardless of how familiar you are with Linux.

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide)

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kgen
Shameless plug, wrote this interactive tutorial for regular expressions for a
friend who was new to them. Seems to have helped a few other people along the
way too.

[http://regexone.com/](http://regexone.com/)

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mrtimo
For complete beginners this is great! [https://blockly-
games.appspot.com/](https://blockly-games.appspot.com/)

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jarcane
Hands down my favorite on this front is probably the Clojurescript Koans site:
[http://clojurescriptkoans.com/](http://clojurescriptkoans.com/)

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gargarplex
O'Reilly

Learning Perl

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018452.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018452.do)

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subsection1h
K&R and the comp.lang.c FAQ.

