Successful Dev Questions Answered: Is W3Schools Spam or Education?

In my time working on various web development projects, both as a student and professionally, I've often hit roadblocks that have left me searching the Internet for answers.

If you've ever done any web development, you've probably heard of a website called W3Schools. It will often pop up near the top of your search engine results when you search for questions related to web development.

Personally, I have not been able to answer many of my questions using just this site. I had wondered if perhaps other developers somehow had some intuitive understanding of web development that made this a more useful resource for them than it was for me or if W3Schools really just is not that great.

Tonight, I stumbled upon an article on SkilledUp that helped me answer this question. The article is about the 20 best free HTML tutorials and I thought I would check it out to see if W3Schools made the list. I was not necessarily expecting W3Schools to make the list, but I certainly was not expecting to read a paragraph that warned readers that it is considered a sham by many experienced developers.

According to the article, W3Schools is very good at search engine optimization, but not always accurate in what it teaches about code. The article also points out that some of the material may be useful. It has helped me on occasion in the past.

What do I take away from all of this? W3Schools will not be the first link I click on when researching a web development problem anymore, even if it is at the top of my search results. I also feel a great deal of reassurance that I was not alone in thinking that this site is not very helpful. Hopefully, this information will be helpful to other people looking for resources to get started in the world of computing!

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