Basic Algorithm Scripting Problems

Hello everyone. I’ve been digging into freecodecamp for the past couple months and am now taking on the “Basic Algorithm Scripting” section. Up until now I have hit a few snags, but I have managed to overcome the questions and provide the right code and move on. Now that I have hit this current section, I am at a complete loss on what to do. After searching, I am finding the answers, but it is still not making sense to me. I’m sure others on here have faced similar problems with this, but I just wanted to throw this out there and see if anyone has any concrete advice on how to overcome this. Thanks.

I’ll check it out. Thanks!

I found those problems often looked overwhelming at first, but it helped to break them down- okay, I know how to do this, this, and this, but not that.

The other thing that helped with a few of them was to use a different JavaScript editor. That way I was able to log out different parts of the code and see if the different pieces were doing what I expected them to do- it really helped me figure out where my errors were. I was using repl.it, and it worked well for me.

3 Likes

Thanks for the info and your experiences.

always keep searching the answers by yourself… it’s hard, yes, you can stay stuck for days? yes! but still, better than get the answers by other people and not understand what is happening…

If you’re interested in taking a step back to improve your approach to problem solving generally you might be interested in Effective Thinking Through Mathematics. Its free, quite light and easy, and really makes you think explicitly about how you problem solve, particularly how to break seemingly impossible problems down into small, manageable chunks.

1 Like

Thank you! I just signed up for the course. I really appreciate you informing me about this.

Hello fellow campers! :slight_smile:

I was going to create a new topic for this, but found this post that already described issues with this section, so I thought I’d echo celticslegends and state how difficult this section has been for me so far. I found that the JavaScript challenges/lessons were often pretty easy to digest and understand, though some were a bit confusing, but now I feel like I don’t really understand it at all. I’ve been watching NetNinja’s “Intro to JavaScript” YouTube series, which seems much easier to understand, but I haven’t yet seen the whole thing to see whether he breaks anything down that could help with the Basic Algorithm Scripting section.

I see the problem they’re asking us to solve, but then I’m at a total loss on how to solve it. I may think that a for loop would be helpful to incorporate somewhere, but I totally stink at getting the syntax right (I just don’t remember the structure and have to keep looking it up). I Google and then find posts on multiple methods that will solve the problem, then try them, then try to understand them.

Is anyone else out there currently feeling discouraged by this section? I know that it’s not supposed to be easy to learn programming, but I felt like I was making decent progress until I got to this section. Now I feel like I will have to go back and do a whole bunch of other reading and online courses just to feel like I deserve to move on through FCC. I certainly don’t see the intermediate front-end development projects coming very easily until I do.

Thanks for any advice you can offer!
Jayna