I have been working my way through the bootstrap lessons and I have completed every lesson prior to that so far. However, I am concerned with how much of this knowledge I will be able to retain from doing these exercises.
Sure, I can figure out how to do each lesson, but I don’t think that I could actually build anything totally from scratch.
Don’t get me wrong, I love FCC but, I’m just wondering if doing these lessons will be enough to actually enable me to code.
So I guess my question is: is there anything else I should be doing to further my education in coding or will this course be enough? It is hard for me to tell at this point because I can’t really tell what’s in the other lessons.
Thanks so much in advance.
Elmo - The Instructional Designer that’s trying to get more skills!
Consider the challenges to be an introduction. You can do them multiple times if you want. You can take notes if it helps. But you won’t really get it until you build a project or 12. This is standard, even with experienced programmers. Whether it’s a new language, framework, or even an algorithm, you probably won’t remember much until you build a working example with it.
seriously get your fav text editor open. sublime text or even something like brackets.io
Then go to getbootstrap.com and copy paste a template. and just start experimenting. Build a website on whatever.
Try to build websites without referring to anything else and see how far you will get.
That is what i did. built websites and html documents on anything. it is how you learn repetition and consistency.
i am breezing through FCC because i have already been on codecademy, codeavengers. This site thus far has been good revision.
No, totally DON’T rely on FCC to teach you anything. The forum and the projects are great. And the syllabus is a good road map. But to learn coding, go to Udemy, Pluralsight, Codeschool, Coursera, Egghead, or Frontend Masters. And then build a load of stuff.
That’s really what the projects are meant to be. Believe me, you will be lots of Bootstrap practice when you’re building things. Keep the documentation handy. You’re never going to not need it. I have it open in one of my tabs right now because I’m using it in a project and life is too short to memorize this crap.
tip: try to redo the codes everyday in a notepad you like
it might seem boring first few weeks but it’ll 100% help you
and don’t be afraid of making mistakes, you need to make the worst code first and than update that code to make something special.
and the most important advice is: don’t force yourself a lot. like doing 5 or 8 hours of code a day, no that’s not gonna help you in fact that’s gonna lead you to hate programming.
Portable, Man that advice is gold! Gold! Thanks so much for being kind enough to point me in the right direction. I had to stop coding for a couple months, but now that I’m back, I had to go back through all of the lessons I had already taken.
I went through all of the Headfirst book on HTML/CSS while taking a break from here. Anyway, thanks so much for your great advice!
Here’s an update for those of you that have helped me out with your advice. I have gone back through the lessons and built projects from memory. This actually makes the 3rd time I’ve been through the basic stuff. However, because I am building everything from memory, I am retaining the knowledge.
I just wanted to thank you all for your support and guidance. You have been so kind to me and I really appreciate it.