I’m struggling with the Node JS/MongoDB course. Are there intentionally pieces that we need to complete the challenges left out? It seems to be artificially confusing. Not to mention the whole Glitch clone thing didn’t work for me at all and I had to copy the files manually–which is another layer of difficulty that really should have been explained in much more detail, imo.
Hello there,
There should be no need to manually copy files over. The Glitch cloning is often buggy, but usually just requires users to use the link two or three times, until the clone is successful.
If you are finding Glitch to be too buggy, then there is the alternative of Repl.it. You can do this, by heading over to the GitHub repo, and clicking the Run in Repl.it button in the README.md file.
Could you be specific as to what you believe to be missing?
Thanks for the tip–maybe I’ll try that, because it’s hard to know if my tests are failing because of my messing up the clone or something else. As an experiment, I have even copied code from the solution and it didn’t work–I think on the echo challenge? And then when I used my own solution, FCC passed me, but it didn’t actually echo anything when I tested it in the browser.
If I go through the course again, I will try to note down exactly what problems I am having for the use of FCC. But generally, it seems that many things are being left out, like where I am supposed to even write the code (I think it’s the App area, but not sure, they never say.) For example, the Schema–I couldn’t tell if that was supposed to be something done in Mongo DB or done in the App–or somewhere else. The tutorial never says.
In general it seems to give a very short description of selected aspects of the upcoming task, without describing why that task is necessary or what it would accomplish in “the real world.”
It never even explains what “mongoose” is–I’m pretty sure it’s a part of Mongo DB, but I don’t think I ever saw that explained in the curriculum.
I’m sorry if this is coming off harsh and I truly appreciate FCC, but in this case, I’m fairly sure it would be easier to just go to Node and Mongo and read the docs rather than take this course.
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I can see that there might be confusion with where to write code. However, the boilerplate should give some excellent instructions within each file (whether to edit or not).
Mongoose.js is an npm module for Node.js that allows you to write objects for Mongo as you would in JavaScript. This can make it easier to construct documents for storage in Mongo.
You are expected to read the docs, in order to be able to complete this section of the course. It is valuable experience to have - being used to tools’ docs.
Do not worry, if you feel lost at times, the course does take an average of 300 hours per section for a reason, and, from personal experience, you will come out of it a better developer. The course only gets tougher, as you keep going.
Although, if you do have some suggestions for improvement, then, by all means, open an issue on the GitHub repo. The contributors are quite friendly, and want to make the course as helpful as possible.
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