Are there books/guides coming out from Forum QAs?

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#1

I wonder if there is any draft-guide to common issues beginners face in mongodb/atlas/drivers, something like a Troubleshooting guide for beginners, that could be constantly updated by users. (And that is free and anyone could contribute at piacere.)

It could also include common errors to problems in the University courses etc.

I believe having a few standard, complete but to the point answers to common problems faced by beginners could be helpful. I thought some could be in the FAQs but that’s not the right place.

It is quite possible though, that no one would read it, but it is just an idea for now.
I’ve asked asked about this similar question in the past, but it may be worthier now, and also not exclusive to M001.

Any one interested, or any thoughts?

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#2

Hi @santimir,

Thank you for the feedback! We don’t have a single guide for beginners as the surface area of that is very broad – there are many products to learn as well as different backgrounds and learning styles to cater to. However, we are always thinking about how to improve developer experience and appreciate any suggestions.

Along with MongoDB University courses, some other resources for learners include:

The MongoDB team is working on some initiatives this year that will refresh these experiences. From the forum point of view, the MongoDB Community team has an ongoing project to add more discoverable resources and FAQs. We’ve started adding some common resources via sidebars and category descriptions (for example, in the Working with Data category) and will be adding FAQs as well (for example, Atlas Serverless FAQ).

Some of the University categories already have FAQs (M001: Frequently Asked Questions) as pinned topics, but we will be adding more consistent resources and cleaning up some of the older posts which are no longer relevant to current courses.

Troubleshooting guides and articles submitted or maintained by the community would be welcome, but to be most useful I think they’d need well defined scope and a review process for changes.

What sort of collaborative process are you envisioning? Some different approaches to consider:

  • Wiki-style editing
  • Git collaboration
  • Comments added to an FAQ that get reviewed and incorporated

Why do you think FAQs wouldn’t be the right place? What sort of format would you suggest? It would be great if you have any reference examples of better formats to consider.

Regards,
Stennie

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#3

thanks for the awesome information.

#4

Hi @Stennie

thanks for the complete reply. Yes all of those, that’s a fantastic post for M001 by @SourabhBagrecha, I hadn’t explore it before. My idea was something like that, I just thought FAQs would be better suited to questions like: what is Atlas, what environments MDB runs in, how does the billing work, which products do you offer etc.

A possible idea for topics and how to collaborate

A few different type of posts could be written (not a curated list of ideas):

  • practical examples
  • further discussion on some topics (example: explain() command for the first courses or connection string and options, etc).
  • Basic projects that a beginner could use and give a general overview of the binaries, this is: a pure JS application where you can interact with the DB both with a driver (through the browser), and compare it using Compass, Mongosh, and maybe some other linux binaries like GET, etc. This obviously for web devs, for other languages there may be better choices.
  • Some basic server-side stuff
  • Some exactly as the one written for M001 where users need a solution to copy paste or an answer to a very specific recurrent problem.

I am aware this is quite broad and overlaps with other resources, that’s why I said ‘not curated’. But this could be the general space of posts, written ‘on demand’ for topics seen again and again.

Hence, those not-too-lengthy article/guide/examples-pages would help in questions, and maybe show clear relationship with the courses.

As to where to collaborate and how, I’d think of a wiki and a slack channel where maintainers/people helping could interact, that way it’s not just separated individual changes to documents, but there is some discussion and interaction with others that is important for learning imho. Hence the creation of those posts should be itself part of the learning path for some of the members apart from a useful resource.

I am not sure of the idea anyways, I was just curious about it. Maybe there is too much overlap with other resources already, and it probably depends if there are other members interested more than anything else.

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