Learning through old tutorials, is it still okay?

Hello, I am learning meteor through https://www.udemy.com/learn-meteorjs-by-building-10-real-world-projects/ but is it still advisable to do so? I’ve just realized that there are major differences between it. For example, the recommended application structure for the tutorial and the current meteor guide is different, the tutorial uses iron router while the guide recommends flow router.

Can I still learn meteor following the tutorial? I’m concern because learning through the documentation is difficult for me.

I think (personally) these courses are better:


and this course:
https://www.udemy.com/meteor-react-tutorial/

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Does it teach the latest trends in meteor? I dont have any background in react btw

React is powerful, but it’s easy to learn the basic. They will teach you both React and Meteor on those courses.

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What’s the meteor version in the course?

Don’t worry about the version of Meteor. The most important thing you got is the concept, data layers, how to subscribe data, how method works, reactive …
I don’t know exactly what version they used in the course, but I think it was 1.4 or 1.5, which is fine.

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Thank you, i’m gonna check it out later.

This is phenomenal and free

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Isn’t that a little too much? i havent even learned and master meteor yet.

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To me, the most successful resources for learning Meteor is the official documentation and tutorials. I would recommend Andrew Mead’s courses at Udemy, too.

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The documentation is okay but i would prefer if it also discussed the usage of each parameters in-depth in which i found the documentation lacking. I would also prefer some examples if it was implemented this way or that way. Though I think it’s me with that kind of very needy learning process while some learn fast and better with minimal guidance.

Don’t forget http://www.meteor-tuts.com

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My recommendations are:

  1. Official tutorial
  2. Official docs and guide
  3. meteor-tuts.com
  4. Level Up Tuts

Everything else I’ve come across has been interesting, but only useful when you understand modern meteor and can do the translation to modern code

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Yeah, I think that’s the problem for my case, i’ve been learning interesting things but in the old ways and cant translate in the new ways.

Just to add my sixpence here…

I can promise you without a doubt that you will spend a lot of time trying to figure out why things aren’t working when you follow any tutorials older than a few months if you are using the latest version of Meteor.

99% of all tutorials I’ve followed (including the one you mentioned and the official Meteor ones) aren’t up to date with the latest codebase. Changes in packages and React versions will throw you off too.

That is a great course you’ve chosen there, it was the first one I took and got me off to a flying start but you will have to ask around for help as quite a few parts won’t work as things seem to change dramatically between Meteor versions (based on my experience using 1.7.0.3 anyway).

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Meteor itself has remained backwards compatible for a long time,
the real issues are with third-party packages, so when something doesn’t work, step one should be removal or replacement of a third party package

I’m sure you are 100% correct, but for newbies coming into Meteor the fact they they get stuck at the simplest of hurdles early on (following tutorials) can be really off putting. It doesn’t really matter what causes the incompatibilities, the fact that they are there can be so frustrating for people trying to learn it.

I guess that is what happens when platforms rely on third party packages to do all the leg work though, as you mentioned.

I have to admit, after being a primarily PHP based developer for about 20 years, moving over to Meteor has been at times so frustrating that I’ve felt like just forgetting it and going for Node & React instead. I’ve found that I’ve spent hours trying to figure out the simplest of things that can be done with PHP in a few minutes and at times it’s made me feel like a bit of a dumbo that just couldn’t grasp it, and without any reliable resources to fallback on for help (until I found this place) it has caused quite a few moments of super frustration.

There is no doubt that Meteor is awesomely powerful, but there really isn’t the up to date community support available (again, apart from this place) for when you come unstuck - which as a newbie you most certainly will. I’m sure in time, as more and more people roll amazing things with Meteor, this will change, but as of 2018 - from my own experience so far, as a newb, be prepared to spend a lot of time debugging.

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This is weird to me but on the other hand I have heard similar comments from my friends, as well. I’ve followed Meteor tutorials and docs, have completed them, indeed, without any problem. Why don’t you submit a documentation ticket when you think there is some required info is missing? Only complaining would not help increase documentation quality.

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I’m not complaining :slight_smile: and I have pointed out some of the flaws in the official tuts on here already.

One of them being that you can’t even complete the first tutorial once you hit the testing stage as it fails due to changes in packages.

The trouble is, most people using Meteor proficiently (as I assume you are) aren’t using the latest version. Even new packages and components being released are using nothing newer than 1.6. The tutorials are mostly way older than that.

For the full-on newb experience try installing the latest version and follow the official Meteor tuts, you’ll see what I mean.

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I understand. Well, I can voluntarily put my effort to address a documentation ticket where I am able to. The point here is that, Meteor is free; it provides many useful libraries, features and tools out of the box for free to the community. So we can altogether help improve Meteor as it is not only MDG’s but also ours.