I’m currently working through the courses on freeCodeCamp and, although I appreciate having the objectives and content available online, I find that I learn best when I write things down. In school, I used to find it really helpful to print PowerPoint slides with a notes section for reference.
I’m looking for advice on how to efficiently take notes for freeCodeCamp courses without having to write down the entire course content. Ideally, I want to capture the most important information, concepts, and code snippets in a way that’s easy to reference later. I tried taking screenshots and cutting/pasting them in my scribbler but that takes alot of time… and screenshots when shrank were just gross. I am definately a visual person so to reference things I will need pictures.
Does anyone have any tips or best practices for organizing notes effectively while using freeCodeCamp? Are there any tools or templates that you find particularly useful? How do you structure your notes to make sure they are helpful for review and study?
Generally, I wouldn’t really recommend taking notes… maybe in the video-based courses, but it would make them stretch out to be really longer than needed.
Since you are mostly learning-by-doing, you are learning patterns of working. The amount of notes that you would need to take to be useful is enormous. All the relevant information is just a search away and you should do that often.
It will be better to search for references on sites that are already complete and well organized like MDN or https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python-for-loops/ (I find that one particularly useful and well-explained).
You will do a lot of reading and more importantly a lot of doing/typing. Both are really important here but I would even say the latter is a bit more important. Your fingers will be learning how to access arrays and write functions just as much as you will read about it.
YMMV and I’m interested to hear others’ thoughts on this but:
I tend to agree, but people learn differently, so I won’t say it can’t work for some.
Personally, I feel like the time it takes to take the notes and keep them organized could be spent better coding instead. As pointed out, you already have all the resources online. For offline usage, you have something like Zeal as well.
I would love to be able to be that person that can learn by watching and doing, but my issue is I need consistency and I need notes to look back on when I am stuck. By writing things down, I find I remember them alot better. One day i could spend an hour on it, then a week goes by without touching it and I forget what I just did or we would come back to something i did early on and forget entirely how I did that then have to go back anyways, I just find hanging something more tangible and organized for me would be better. My hubby just introduced me to Onenote… I actually never used this before, so it might be something I can try as well
A day or two before starting a course, take a few minutes to read the course description.
For example:
Learn HTML Forms by Building a Registration Form, Not started
You can use HTML forms to collect information from people who visit your webpage.
In this course, you’ll learn HTML forms by building a signup page. You’ll learn how to control what types of data people can type into your form, and some new CSS tools for styling your page.
Then write down in a list the concepts you are going to learn:
forms: what are they used for?
types of data / how to control
new css styling
Then as you complete each step, write down what you learnt.
Try to limit each session to an hour. After each session, take a break for a few minutes, then go over your notes, summarising as much as you can.
Then repeat the cycle. At the end of the day, add to the original list what you learnt.
The next day, read the list again, and briefly skim the notes.
A few days after finishing the course, search the internet for “signup forms” and click on the images tab to see how people are actually structuring and styling forms. Pick two or three and spend an hour so coding practice projects that are similar.
taking notes reviewing what you learnt getting practice
taking notes