So I’m a little embarrassed to even ask this, but here goes;
Are you supposed to be able to just rattle off these JavaScript challenges off the top of your head, while not making any syntax mistakes or anything? AKA pretend I am using a computer that is not hooked up to the internet and just solve the challenge without having to look anything up at all?
I’m just asking so I can quit now because I don’t think I will ever get to that point lol.
I find myself getting close, but I always seem to miss something. I can get the general idea of the logic that needs to happen when I look at the challenge, but sometimes I will be way off on the syntax. When I look at the answer, you can tell I was kind of going in the right direction, yet I am not even getting close at getting the syntax 100% correct.
No, if you could do this stuff without making any mistakes you dont need this course. This course is designed to put you to chalenges that you dont know about, and force you to make a heap of mistakes and ultimately learn from them.
We all miss something and the further we go along the more we learn and the less we need to consult google etc.
We have google and we are allowed to ask questions and search for help and hints. It doesnt matter is your result looks nothing like the answers, if it works then you are on the right track. Your results might be 3 times as many lines of code but thats ok, its about understanding and exposing yourself to different types of functions and methods. Its a big course so take your time.
The point is not to memorize the solution to these challenges but to learn how to analyze a problem, think of a solution, try out your solution, test, debug… repeat, rinse if your initial solution/approach didn’t work.
If it’s project, you also need to learn how to break down a big project into smaller, manageable pieces… work on each piece (or assign some tasks to another person), and combine them all in the end.
When I’m working on a big project, it’s more important for me to know how to break it down so I can work on each task. I may write pseudo-code that outlines my thinking and steps/approach to solve/finish a particular task as comments in my code. Later, those comments are replaced with the actual working code.
I’m not too concerned if I forget the syntax or parameters required of a particular command or function. That just takes a few seconds of googling. Syntax mistakes – a good editor will catch these and warn you beforehand, or do little things for you like automatically close a tag, or let you know if your brackets/parens are mismatched, etc. I work with C# which is a strictly typed language so any syntax error are also caught before the code/page even runs (missing semicolons, assigning a string to an int variable, etc). Again, these syntax errors just take a few seconds to find and fix.
Syntax errors are easy-peasy. They’re easy to fix. It’s more important that your thought of solution (i.e. your algorithm) will work and solve that particular problem.