I’ve made significant progress through the Full Stack Developer Curriculum so far, but I recently hit a major roadblock when I reached the section on Regular Expressions in JavaScript.
To be honest, I feel that FreeCodeCamp didn’t explain this topic well. When I asked for clarification, I was advised to “look for beginner-friendly guides or examples.” To me, this clearly suggests that the curriculum alone isn’t sufficient for understanding this topic, and external resources are practically required.
It turns out I’m not the only one struggling. For example, in the “Build a Palindrome Checker” lab, a quick forum search shows over 260 threads where people had difficulty solving it. That’s a huge number — far more than any other project I’ve encountered — and it clearly indicates that many learners are stuck at this point.
The issue is deeper than just this one topic. Difficult concepts like regex don’t receive the kind of reinforcement and training they truly need. Contrast this with the early JavaScript lessons, where we were repeatedly asked to use console.log in ways that didn’t add much value.
This is the “Build a Greeting Bot” workshop :
console.log("Hi there!");
console.log("I am excited to talk to you.");
let bot;
let botLocation;
bot = "teacherBot";
botLocation = "the universe";
console.log("Allow me to introduce myself.");
const botIntroduction = "My name is " + bot + ".";
console.log(botIntroduction);
const botLocationSentence = "I live in " + botLocation + ".";
console.log(botLocationSentence);
bot = "professorBot";
const nicknameIntroduction = "My nickname is " + bot + ".";
console.log(nicknameIntroduction);
bot = "awesomeTeacherBot";
const newNicknameGreeting = "I love my nickname but I wish people would call me " + bot + ".";
console.log(newNicknameGreeting);
const favoriteSubject = "Computer Science";
const favoriteSubjectSentence = "My favorite subject is " + favoriteSubject + ".";
console.log(favoriteSubjectSentence);
and here’s you can see that this doesn’t make any sense, perhaps you wanna stop that
There was a lot of repetition — but for something very basic. Meanwhile, regex, which is complex and essential, lacks both detailed explanation and sufficient practice.
This experience is making me question whether I’ll be able to fully grasp the rest of the curriculum.
I’m sharing this not just as a complaint, but as a constructive suggestion: please consider improving the depth and support around harder topics like regular expressions. It could make a huge difference in helping learners stay motivated and confident in their progress.
You should always be consulting multiple sources for anything that you need to know more about. No single curriculum in the world is going to cover 100% of any topic, that’s not a realistic expectation.
You’ve learned how to use regex, and regex is just a huge dictionary of symbols to use. You can look those up as you need them. I don’t think you would want a lesson on every single regex symbol.
fCC will give you a solid base that you can build on, but that is up to you. Be self-reliant. Know how to learn on your own by expanding on your knowledge in multiple ways. Expect to use other resources.
You can always search for “How to <do this in regex>”, “How does bubble sort work?” etc. If you ever need more information it’s readily available.
I’m sorry you’re having a hard time at the moment with the curriculum. I definitely agree with you that the projects can over-emphasize and under-emphasize concepts in various degrees (and of various degrees of importance). I have noticed that most recently myself in the brand new React curriculum. So I think there’s no argument with that observation.
It’s also quite hard as a new learner to be told to, essentially go fishing, to learn from other resources when one is not even sure what they’re trying to learn. That also is true.
From my own experience as a learner in fCC, I’ve found it hard to get much traction though when discussing issues informally (via chats and posts etc). I’ve found I get more traction by opening issues against the fCC GitHub repository. But that does require more effort to do (I have to spend more time gathering my thoughts into something understandable and cohesive, and I have to communicate these into written form and I have to be prepared debate/discuss/defend them in written form as well.) I often wish I could just have a frank chat with someone about the concerns I have rather than go thru the Github issue process, but as I said, I’ve not had much success with that route so far.
So all of that to say, if you have some concrete suggestions to make to the folks at fCC, your best bet at the moment is go through the issue opening process. (something concrete where you can point to a specific step for example and be able to say what it is about that step that could be improved) And of course, with respect to regular expressions or any other hard concepts you may encounter, feel free to drop into the Discord server and have a 1-1 chat with us there and we’d be happy to help you out further (though you should expect that process to also be somewhat challenging, as we like people to put in some effort before asking questions in general)
consider that it has been a certification project for far longet than the full stack curriculum existing, it is normal that is has many people asking for help, it has been there for years.
but you don’t need to solve it with regex
regex, is an hard concept, but it is also something that you need to know it exists, but you don’t need to know that much about it. If you think there are specific regex arguments that need to be added to the curriculum, or reinforced more, you can create an issue on github, every issue is triaged and considered. There has been already many things added to the curriculum from campers feedback