Sometimes, there are two ways to do things. It’s great if a programmer knows how to write a specific block of code in both ways, and understand the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. Now, why not take web tutorials or technical books and have them teach two things at once? If it sounds a little confusing to you, think of it this way. Let’s see, there are a lot of online PHP tutorials out there, so let’s use that as an example. Let’s say we have an online PHP tutorial that teaches how to use MySQL and PostgreSQL with PHP.

The programmer, previously knowing how to work with neither, now knows how to work with two popular databases that PHP supports. I think that the dual tutorial could greatly improve what is learned from a tutorial or book that applies this concept. It will also save the programmer time as he does not have to learn something else in the event that he cannot write something the way that he wants to (or, continuing with the database example, MySQL is not available).

But might be a problem with my dual tutorial idea. What if teaching two ways to do everything takes too long? Well, it depends on how much is taught in the tutorial and who the audience is. If the audience is a beginning PHP programmer that wants to learn to program well, that programmer might be willing to spend more time on learning in exchange for being able to write better code.

So, what do you think? Is the dual tutorial actually something that might help people learn, or is it just another idea that wouldn’t work?