Cédric's Shortform

'I think you should just learn the concepts yourself then apply them to making the website without following a tutorial. When I was following tutorials I could not make projects independently afterwards using what I had just learned in the tutorials'

Feel free to ignore if you don't want to go on an object-level tangent, but my current impression of my own learning style is that structured course -> own project is often the best combination. The structured course gives me a clear starting point and prevents me from feeling lost or overwhelmed. It's true that I will only retain a relatively small fraction of the details, and an even smaller fraction of what I actually need to know IRL, but if the course is any good it will make the self-guided learning of the second phase much easier. 

For example, I'm currently doing a couple of web dev projects, having previously done some 'online bootcamp'-style courses. I'm having to do a heck of a lot of googling, including some embarrassingly basic stuff, but I still feel like the courses did at least a few useful things:

• demystified the whole process, so that I usually have at least a rough idea what to look for and where;
• recommended (and gave me some experience with) various useful tools;
• gave me a sense of which kinds of project are feasible.

If I were smarter or more reliably self-motivated, maybe the courses would have been a waste of time; I certainly could have learned the same material in a purely self-guided way, and perhaps I could have done so much more efficiently. But realistically, I think I would have been much more likely to give up in frustration had I tried to dive straight in.

(I realise your friend was talking about a Youtube tutorial, and I'm talking about courses that are more foundational and less focused on teaching you how to do one specific thing, and that your position on those might be different.)