So many of freecodecamp challenge tutorials are online and even some of the projects. Is it right to take those tutorials to complete these challenges faster or to crack your own brain until you arrive at the solution?
Any review and answers will be appreciated.
If your goal is to finish FCC tutorials faster (to get your FCC certificate faster), I think you’re missing the whole point of learning.
What’s going to happen if you got a job and were asked to do something different? Are you going to find a tutorial for that?
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Thanks for the response.
My aim is not to collect the certificate faster and am not a fan of taking tutorials of already done challenges as I completed almost all of the challenges myself; nothing gives greater joy than that. But sometimes it gets hard and you need to look or ask for some help.
But when someone has already done a particular project and then provides with a step by step guide to do the same(of which you can modify and even make it better), is it not wiser to learn from the person and then apply what you have learnt in some other places or real world problems?
It’s not a particularly good way to develop a deeper understanding of the point of the project, to be honest.
When I need a tutorial to ramp up on a new idea, I seek one semi related but different.
For example, I was really struggling with React, but instead of watching a ‘how to make the FCC leaderboard’ tutorial and coding along, I took a seperate course on React fundamentals (where I did a code-along for a different app altogether).
Once I finished that section of my course, I returned to the Leaderboard project and was able to create all of the react components, and pass state and props around well, from scratch in about 4 hours. I’m just working on CSS for it now.
This is better because the problem I was trying to solve still needed some thinking outside of what I’d been shown to do. For example, I had to work with a table (which was not covered by the course I did) and this presented some new challenges. Likewise, I needed a couple of click events on something that doesn’t look like a button, but for semantic reasons should probably be a button, so reasoning about that for myself was a new challenge not covered by the course. I was also loading from an API, which again wasn’t covered, so loading up state that way was a third challenge.
But…having done that I am now super confident about how React works without Redux (that’s the next part of my course), and I was able to prove it to myself with reverse engineering the FCC project without peeking at the code.
If you can’t find a suitable equivalent tutorial or course, then by all means follow the tutorials you have found, but then you must do a separate project of your own to cement the learning.
Happy coding!
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Thanks to @owel, @camperextraordinaire and @JacksonBates for the contributions, your comments were really helpful.