When "RTFM" Fails

Been starting to get into a routine (always a good idea when starting new ventures) where I switch off between days where I make a blog post and days where I go through a tutorial.  The last week or so, I've been going through the tutorials in GameMaker, getting an idea of how useful it will be for my own efforts.  So far, the tutorial projects haven't been bad, but I've been running into a problem.



To set the stage, there is a tutorial in GameMaker for putting together a "Breakout" clone.  As clone projects go, it's relatively simple.  However, as I made my way through the tutorial, I started noticing little things which didn't seem to make sense.  Ambiguous references to actions, code snippets which seemed oddly incomplete (even to somebody who doesn't really do code well), and clearly buggy functionality like the paddle getting stuck to the walls and such.  By the end of it, it was mostly working, but bugs still remained.  I went back through, compared what I had with what was put down in the tutorial.  Aside from capitalization choices for naming conventions, things looked to be correct.

This leads me to wonder if one of the following scenarios is happening:

• The guys at YoYo Games haven't been updating their tutorials in lock step with the updates to GameMaker.  While it's not the end of the world, it is rather a pain in the ass.  The whole point of a tutorial is to build with the tools as they operate right now, not as they did a couple sub-revisions or even versions back.
• The tutorials are not as well written as they could be.  Having had to write up KB articles as part of my job function previously, I know that there are two competing pressures at work when it comes to readers.  There's the pressure to describe the process in as much detail as possible to ensure that people don't screw things up.  There's also the pressure of not stating the overly obvious.  The hitch is that what's might be overly obvious to you or me might be unfathomable to Bob two cubicles over.
• The tutorials are being deliberately written wrong, a backhanded hazing from the "pros" designed to torment the "n00bs."  Honestly, this seems highly unlikely, and putting Hanlon's Razor to the problem, it's more likely that whoever wrote those tutorials was probably getting to a point mentally where they got ahead of themselves, skipping steps, making assumptions about people's comprehension levels, that sort of thing.

All things being equal, my guess is Scenario#2.  The thing that irritates me about this scenario is that for the tutorial in question, it seems to potentially introduce bad habits for coding and ultimately design.  Far better to write a tutorial that goes all the way, the right way, the first time.  Deliberately leaving out chunks of code in the tutorial, then going back to those spots and putting them in "correctly" strikes me as a good way to ensure bad code

Still haven't debugged it fully, but I will eventually.  Or say "to hell with it," and move on to the next tutorial.