The course about responsive web design (HTML, CSS) went really well for me. I’m confident with my HTML capacity and when it comes to CSS, I still have a lot to learn and it may take a while for me to master like the way I position my elements and the way I use my media queries.
Now, about the title, it may be a dumb anticipation but I thought the JavaScript course would go smoothly as Responsive Web Design, but you guessed it, I was wrong. I will be brutally honest, every lesson I couldn’t pass it without looking at the hints, or searching it on YouTube (I do find Florin Pop’s journey on this camp useful to watch, if you may ask.)
I’m 100% sure I’m not the only one going through this event. And as to why I thought of writing this topic as a motivation that even if JavaScript doesn’t flow smoothly in your brain, as well, that is not enough reason to question your capacity. I’ve adopted the mindset of most of the developers that it’s not about how long you finish the course, it’s about how much we learn.
Enjoy the process, don’t rush, don’t question your capacity, you are good. We can do this, let’s continue learning!
I’ve adopted the mindset of most of the developers that it’s not about how long you finish the course, it’s about how much we learn.
This is such an important mindset to have. Learning development is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s a life-long journey of learning, and that’s why many people love it.
It sounds like you’re taking the exact approach to this that you should - keep it up, you got this!
Different people have different areas that are difficult or easy for them.
JS is harder than what came before - it is “real” programming.
FCC runs through things kind of quickly, don’t be surprised if you have to google things. In fact that is a good thing - that is a big part of being a developer. I just finished a feature at work that took me a week. I spent probably 1/3 of that time googling a reading docs trying to figure out how to to this, some of it was in a computer language I’d never done before. This is not unusual.
You aren’t expected to memorize everything. You will forget things, that’s fine. It’s more important to learn the ideas, learn what is possible, learn how to look it up. MDN is a great resource for JS. I would google “MDN …” for whatever operator or method you need. I would just get in the habit now.
This is hard stuff, it takes time. Go easy on yourself. If this were easy it would pay minimum wage.
HTML and CSS are very lenient so you can get away with a lot of errors and the page will still work. To some extent anyway and it doesn’t yell at you and blow up as JS does. But that doesn’t mean your HTML and CSS are well written and wouldn’t have blown up if the languages wanted it (check out XML and you will be yelled at fairly quickly).
JS is not about to let you get away with the same errors. If you make a syntax error it will “Halt and Catch Fire”. There is no reason to try and recover and “see if it might work anyway” by executing code with syntax errors. If it did chances are it would fail in 99% of all cases anyway, so why even bother.
Then you have the actual programming logic which is just something much harder to grog than anything a markup language will ever have to offer. The code might run but do the wrong thing. Or it might turn your device into a toaster oven. The environment doesn’t care your code still runs, for better or for worse.
I do see a lot of beginners trying to do static code analysis when all they have to do is add a few console logs or learn the debugger. It is fine if you need help to understand the code, you do not have to be able to just read it all and understand everything. There is a lot to keep track of, use the tools you have at your disposal.
Debugging is an important skill. Instead of just reading the code, you run it and look at it as it runs. Using a debugger you can look at the execution in real-time and step through the code. At the very least run the code and log out values. When you set something log it, before you use something log it, when you receive something log it, before you return something log it, log all the things!
Very good topic. When things are easy, it means you are not learning much new things. The real progress happens when things are hard. Then you know for sure you deal with something out of your knowledge, which means you have the chance of learning something new. The progress is estimated with how much effort you had to put in something. If you put minimum effort, you gained minimum progress. If you put great effort, you most likely came a long way.
Tbh, what I feel is that FCC doesn’t tell you about how JS should be implemented with your HTML until you reach the Front-end-libraries. And even after you learn the use of JS in your HTML document after you go through the Front-end-libraries section. It still won’t tell you the underlying concepts that were being used to create those libraries in the first place. That’s why most of the people are unaware that the things that you can do with using a library can be done without using them as well, just the catch is that you need to write complex algorithms for that using plain JS.
In order to not re-create something which already has been created, people use libraries.
I hope that you would be able to overcome what you’re going through. And if you wanna know how I overcame the phase that you’re in, as we all have to go through that cause there’s no way around to it.
Just lemme know and I’d be there to help.
Python.
