I want to learn Budibase and I hope it will be a tool to solve my "Excel is not a database" situation with my personal finance tracking. Keeping that project in mind to anchor my study, I returned to Budibase documentation ready to learn more. They had an excellent "Overview" page, followed by an informative "Quickstart" project. Given those two precedents, I had expected "Quickstart" to be followed by a smooth ramp-up for beginners. Turns out I was overly optimistic. I found a significant gap between "Quickstart" and the knowledge needed to build my own Budibase app.

Going down the documentation index sidebar, "Quickstart" is followed by "Guides and resources". This is a collection of solutions to common problems, sometimes called a recipe cookbook. I'm sure it's a great resource, but for a beginner like myself coming right out of "Quickstart", a cookbook is not what we need. Beginners lack experience to understand the solutions being offered. Even worse, we don't even necessarily understand the problems being solved. I suffered a similar problem when I encountered the Node-RED cookbook.

After the "Getting Started" section, Budibase documentation had sections titled "Data", "Design", and "Bindings" but I saw nothing telling a beginner how they tied together. I was undaunted -- I've been in similar situations before -- so I dove in to read those sections and learn what I can. There were a lot of cross-referencing in those sections (each had references to the other two) meaning it wouldn't help to read the three sections in any particular order. I had to accept I wouldn't understand everything the first pass. Then, after reading all three sections once, return to read them all a second time. Only then did I feel I have a basic grasp of how a Budibase app worked.

I think there's room for improvement here. If my experience is representative, I could see potential Budibase users getting discouraged trying to jump over this post-"Quickstart" gap. In hindsight, I think a few sentences at the end of the "Quickstart" guide would have gone a long way to help. Here's my first draft:

Budibase Data Flow

This tutorial covered the core of every Budibase app, but things will be done differently beyond a tutorial.

  • Obviously real Budibase apps will not use our sample data. Visit Introduction to data to see how Budibase can work with your data.

  • This tutorial used autogenerated screens to get started quickly with a generic table interface. A good application will tailor an interface to best display and interact with its underlying data. Data in design goes into more details on how to do so.

  • Our autogenerated tables also handled linking data between database and user interface elements. These links are called bindings and Introduction to bindings covers how to define them.

I might submit this, or an evolution of it, as a proposed contribution after I get some Budibase experience to be confident this is actually correct. There's a lot to learn.