I have full respect, we have all been beginners at some point and therefore I try myself to help fellows as much where I feel I can contribute
But lately the General category on board has become so fully crowded, almost cluttered, it is hard to see "the forest due to all trees hiding the view"
Many, many questions are related to "first time users", should we not have a "Getting started" category where all those could reside? Admins could decide if a misplaced topic belongs there and simply move it to relevant place
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I too was recently a beginner and in many ways still am, so I hope the group will excuse my taking this opportunity to mention a few things that might make it easier to help those just starting out with Node-RED.
I may not be a typical beginner, having more than forty years of (part-time) experience in scientific programming, but I came to NR with no knowledge of HTML beyond v2.0 and never having used CSS or JavaScript. Since NR is not meant to require those skills, it seems to me that beginners' questions should be answered, as much as possible, with that in mind. In other words, solutions using only core or contributed nodes in a straightforward way may be better than simpler or more elegant ones involving coding in function or template nodes. (Unless, of course, the question clearly asks for something more advanced.)
I found the W3schools.com tutorials very helpful, but when a beginner shows obvious ignorance of basic JS or HTML, it may not be helpful just to point to the site and suggest beginning at the beginning. A pointer to a specific topic or section can get someone started in the right direction and show him or her more exactly what needs to be learned. None of us started a new language by learning everything first and coding later.
Finally (and I know I've gone on too long), the fact that NR grows out of a community very familiar with Web development means that it inherits a lot of concepts and tools that may not be known to programmers from a different background. Among the things that were new to me were node.js, npm, git, angular.js, mustache notation, and JSONata. Once the only answer to a beginner's question involves any of those things, I suspect that question no longer belongs in the "Getting Started" category.
