Programming Tutorials Are Dead

So this is not a particularly convenient opinion for me to have.

Not literally. Somebody will read a Rails tutorial today. Somebody will buy a programming book this week. I will probably write more tutorials myself. What is dying is the old contract around them: I build a clean example application, show you how I implemented something, and then you do the work of translating that example into the application you actually care about.

Section titled “The revenue is already trying to tell us something” I have sold developer books and other educational products for years. I know what launches used to look like, what warm-list sales looked like, and what happened when an article started ranking and pulled somebody into the rest of the catalog. My own gross revenue from traditional developer education has been moving in the wrong direction.