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Tips for Developing Good Tutorials

Adron Hall shares some advice on writing a tutorial (or any kind of technical documentation):

Here’s the deal, tutorial writers: lay out ALL the prerequisites clearly at the beginning. And I mean ALL of them. Don’t assume I have jq installed for your GraphQL tutorial. Don’t assume I’m running the latest version of Python (and for the love of code, specify WHICH Python – 2.x or 3.x?).

And here’s a novel idea: how about actually telling me where to find and install these prerequisites? Give me links, give me version numbers, give me command line instructions. Assume I’m starting from scratch on a fresh machine. Because guess what? Sometimes I am!

I think that the set of tips Adron provides is aspirationally solid, meaning that there may be some things you can’t actually do but you should certainly try to do all of them. And I’m certainly not perfect at this.