When comparing Stencylpedia vs W3Schools, the Slant community recommends Stencylpedia for most people. In the question“What are the best game programming tutorials for beginners?” Stencylpedia is ranked 4th while W3Schools is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Stencylpedia is:
Stencyl's visual scripting system is directly based on MIT Scratch, designed for accessibility and ease of learning.
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Pros
Pro Based on the MIT Scratch teaching system
Stencyl's visual scripting system is directly based on MIT Scratch, designed for accessibility and ease of learning.
Pro Easy to learn
All the tutorials are written in a straightforward and easy to understand way.
Pro Built in editor
Almost every example has a "try it yourself" button which opens up an editor in a new tab. It allows you to play with the example code and see how it works.
Pro Well organized tutorials
All of the lessons are separated into their own pages, which makes it easy to learn about specific concepts.
Pro Great source from Google search's perspective
Cons
Con Text-based coding gets minimal coverage
Visually-constructed code is translated to the Haxe language and can be inspected as text. Direct Haxe code entry is also supported, but other than a single appendix on the "Code Mode" this is not covered in the Stencylpedia tutorial.
Con Outdated practices / problem solutions
The practices that are shown to solve the problems at hand are rarely, if at all, updated. Usually, their tutorials and learning material is updated only after they see their profits drop.
Con Doesn't care about teaching right
There are multiple errors in the data they show. Although the solutions they show work, they will lead to unmaintainable code. That happens even when the maintainable code alternatives are as easy or accessible to new programmers as the alternatives.
Con Certifications not recognized
Many professionals in IT agree that w3s certifications are not recognized by them and are deemed useless. Good luck finding any respectable professional that accepts a w3s certification.
Con It is for profit
What defines what goes is and what gets fixed on w3schools is what gives them profit and what doesn't (through their ads system).
Con Written tutorials only
While many learning resources offer a mixture of media in their courses (such as videos, challenges etc.), w3schools offers only written tutorials and code editors. This makes w3schools more beneficial as a quick reference rather than a primary learning resource.