Is it okay to check w3schools?

I am trying to make my portfolio page and ı am keep checking w3schools because i keep forgetting everything i know. is it okay to constantly checking w3schools?

Yeah sure. Search all the information you want.

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I was doing some web work today using the Bootstrap website as a reference. It’s a good thing to have a list of “Go To” websites as references. I have bookmarks of different websites for reference.

Example of my bookmarks

Search
ASP.Net MVC
– C#
– CSS
|-- CSS Table
– Markdown
– Prototyping
– TSQL
– Webservers
|-- Apache
|-- IIS

Dev
– Cheatsheets
– Tutorials
|-- ASP.Net
|-- CSS
|-- HTML
|-- JS

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And 8 months and 300something challenges farther down the road, I’m still checking it constantly (and stackOverflow, and MDN, etc). Albert Einstein was once put on the spot for not having the speed of sound memorized off the top of his head, and his response was essentially “That’s what reference works are for.” Eventually, one by one, things start getting second-nature, but in the meantime, no harm in looking it up.

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You shouldn’t think of these courses as you would of school or college. The goal is to do things, do them enough and the knowledge sticks. Even looking at other people’s solutions is ok, as long as you develop everything by yourself. As you do more and more you get to remember the concepts and commands.

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its okay to check for help; however, I prefer going to MDN or stackoverflow instead.
http://www.w3fools.com/

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Son, let me give you some advice, that’s why there is the internet and google and documentation. Fact is, we all cannot remember off the back off our heads all these amazing web technologies and their functions.

I have a friend who is qualitified ACCA accountant, she was top. She said google is her friend at times when she can’t remember stuff. And trust me, they only have a few set of standards to remember compare to showing having to know JS, JQuery, PHP, Rails etc.

With saying that, I think one the main key of being a strong developer is reading a documentation and putting it into play. For example, i’m more PHP and when i’m doing anything PHP, first thing I do is to google to see if there is any in built function to get it done faster. Although you know of ways to do things, Its good to research other people ways to see if they have a more faster and efficient way to get it done. Eventually you will start to learn these things first hand.

Sometime ago I looked back on some PHP code I wrote 2 years ago, and i’m like what in the world was I doing writing all those code and now I probably do it with half the lines of code.

W3schools I find have layman terms definition so its brilliant for beginners to wrapping their head around.

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w3fools used to be much more scathing about w3schools, but they’ve had to really take a step back in their ire because it just isn’t any where near as bad as it used to be!

In the good Ol’ days, they used to teach PHP with awful security flaws, leaving lots of web forms open to SQL injection, so people that knew better were right to really slam them for it.

These days it’s actually a pretty great beginner resource (which even w3fools acknowledges), and the built in code editor is really handy for experimenting with ideas. I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from checking w3schools as an initial point of reference - especially because MDN is not that beginner friendly and it actually takes a reasonable amount of JS knowledge before it makes much sense. Obviously, once you have that knowledge under your belt, MDN is kinda the gold standard for JS docs.

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Wow, you’re right they are a lot less scathing. I haven’t been on their site for a year, but I’m glad to hear they got some things fixed.

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The more you code the more you will remember, but it’s impossible to remember everything. Human brain seem to have a way to put the information we use often in front. While the information we used once or twice is getting burried so deep in our memory that it becomes unreachable, thus we have to remind ourselves what we already learned.

I love using w3schools for a quick reference. When I started my journey in coding I used to use it extensively and I agree with others that it’s a good place for beginners. The main reason is that things are explained in a simple manner which is a way more approachable for beginners than MDN. For example w3schools really helped me to understand Bootstrap. This site also has a few very nicely explained tutorials on how to create this or that.

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Always, even senior developers can’t possibly remember everything there is. Always use documentation :slight_smile:
Personally I’m not a fan of w3 but check out http://devdocs.io/

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Is it ok to use W3Schools as a reference book? Of course, that’s what it was made for originally.

Should you use W3Schools as a Reference book? Well, that’s another issue entirely and most established devs will tell you it’s generally not a good idea. The trouble is getting a dev to quite scoffing and gesturing at though thought of W3Schools long enough to give you an answer as to why it’s a poor reference.

Simply put, it doesn’t keep up with the ever-changing "best-practices"guidelines. So all the code you learn will work bu you might still have written (for example)

<img src="./my_image.jpg" />

Your image will work but it needs the alt="" attribute for SEO and /> is no longer acceptable but will still work.

Imagine being an employer and hiring som someone who said they knew what they are doing and t receiving entire pages with those kind of errors. That is why we don’t like W3Schools.[

Wrote this as a general reply but didn’t realize I was typing in a box that was a reply to a comment within the thread. Sorry for my novice (said the 17 year veteran who managed to screw up twice on a simple forum)

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