Learning from Out-of-date Online Tutorials & Courses?

To keep expanding my software knowledge and coding skills, I search frequently for online tutorials and courses. But many that I find are in need of software updates and clearly are being neglected by the authors and/or companies that posted them. It's not helpful to me when I find an online project that looks intriguing yet requires considerably earlier versions of the software I have loaded and am now trying to learn.

I'm guessing the tutorial or course authors did not get paid much, if anything, for their efforts or got very little feedback from those who used the materials. And now they have moved on to other opportunities and challenges in their software careers and have simply left their once-helpful materials marooned in cyberspace.

What can be done about this, realistically? Try to contact the authors and ask them to update what they posted (or at least give you some guidance)? Attempt the tutorial project using the much-newer software releases and force yourself to try to debug and rewrite your way to completion? Use the bones of an outdated tutorial and try to create a new and somewhat different project? Or--???

What approach(es) do you favor?

Comments

[mirjamuher]

I'm actually running into this a lot with my hobby-project. The framework libGDX and the map editor Tiled I use have an active community around it, but are also "older" - so a lot of outdated tutorials have accumulated over the years. Worse, all libGDX discourse seems to have moved to discord; so whenever I'm googling, I find outdated answers.

Unfortunately, I don't really have a solution. My general approach is using bits and pieces of (outdated) tutorials together with whatever up-to-date documentation I can find and cobbling the two together until it works. Plus, now I'm trying myself to write some tutorials on issues I encountered, in the hopes of helping out other newbies like myself.

If you have the energy to, I think it'd be nice to contact the authors and let them know that something is out of date. At a minimum, they can add a disclaimer to their document; or maybe it'll make them want to take a closer loo. In any case, I'm sure they'll appreciate the pointer and the feedback, that their work is still being viewed and used :)

[Si Dunn]

I appreciate your well-worded and well-considered response and hearing how you cobble together whatever old stuff and new stuff you can find and pound on it until it works. I have been frustrated by numerous tutorials that turn out to be out of date, and this has slowed my learning process when I hit a dead end and can't figure out--or find out--what to do next. I tend to be impatient and just move on to some other tutorial. I should, perhaps, put a stronger focus on one tutorial at a time and try my best, using online sites and tools, plus reaching out to the author(s). Thank you again for your response!