If it’s not on Google and no one has created a tutorial for it on YouTube, it probably doesn’t exist. We’ve all been looking for how to do something and found a way to do it on one of these Alphabet services. No matter what your question is about, the answer is there.

But as one self-taught programmer reported on Reddit, even if Google and YouTube give you an answer, it’s likely not the right answer, or at least not the most reliable one.

I learned this from a YouTube video

It’s an increasingly common phrase among young people (and not-so-young people). YouTube has become a kind of visual Wikipedia where you can learn to solve certain problems in both professional, personal and academic fields.

This huge variety of answers to the most unusual doubts creates a certain dependence on information uploaded to YouTube in video form or on tutorials that later appear in searches. The problem is that these tutorials Created by students, people with limited knowledge or be completely wrong about this.

The power of the internet is that anyone can share their knowledge with others from home. This is also its main disadvantage because anyone can write a tutorial and as the programmer decried on Reddit, most of them are made by apprentices or students who do not have deep knowledge of the subject.

Additionally, Google and YouTube’s search algorithms don’t reward the most complete content or the one that offers a better solution; instead, they focus on the content that is best optimized for that. This means that the most educational and useful content doesn’t always appear in search.

Quick access to content is all it takes for the person who needs to learn how to solve this problem It is a superficial solution and does not deepen knowledge necessary. That is, it focuses only on the solution or how to do something, without taking into account the consequences of why the problem arose, how to avoid it in the future, or how to apply that solution to other situations.

Advantages of learning from a reliable source

According to Genbeta, the self-taught programmer stated that based on his experience, official documentation is the most solid source of information for learning about a topic or programming language.

As the programmer claims on Reddit, official information comes directly from the creator of the program or the language, thus ensuring that it is always updated with the latest functions and does not contain erroneous information.

Additionally, white papers provide a global vision of the technology, allowing knowledge to scale from the most basic foundation to solving more complex problems.

This access to more complete information provides access to information from a broader perspective; it is not just focused on how to do a certain thing, which allows for a learning process. learning and problem solving more complete. At a professional level, this learning will allow solutions already learned to be applied to other problems in the future—a problem-solving process that has helped Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos succeed in their careers.

Learning strategies

Please note that all of this does not disqualify Google searches or YouTube as sources of information for learning new skills. In fact, watching a few YouTube videos can help you get familiar with the problem and serve as an approach to get started.

But the programmer known as RockyBass on Reddit doesn’t recommend sticking solely with the information shown in these videos or tutorials, and recommends leveraging that knowledge by going to the official documentation to discover why this solution works if there’s a faster alternative. or better yet and what is causing this problem in the first place.

The Feynman learning method suggests that in addition to learning how to do something, it is advisable to put it into practice in different scenarios to approach the solution from different angles. This practice will strengthen and hinder the knowledge on this subject. Addiction to Google and YouTube tutorials allowing you to find solutions on your own in the future.

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