I’m learning to code and just got to the python caesar cipher and i’m not exactly understanding everything that comes up. I feel like I can translate most of it by mind but should I go back and review if I forgot? The same thing for future things I learn about, do I need to know absolutely everything or would it be ok forgetting a some things? Only reason im asking is because I don’t want to go ahead and progress without really knowing the important things.
It is normal to look stuff up. But you should not look up answers to problems, only reference material to help you
It’s definitely ok. Sometimes certain things might not click until the 2nd or 3rd time you encounter them. Then all of those times will add up and you’ll understand.
Give it time, just keep moving ahead.
Hello Dio, welcome to the forums!
When it comes to learning anything complex, there’s always multiple layers between “learning it” and truly understanding it.
For example can you know what is important without knowing about other things that are actually more important? No you can’t because without that context its unclear what is important and what is not important.
This can cause some people to start trying to memorize/remember everything, which not only is overwhelming, but can easily end up with you memorizing a bunch of unimportant things you don’t know are unimportant without progressing further.
As mentioned above, you can always look things up, so with that in mind I can tell you that as long as you know the name of something, why you’d want it, and what to watch out for when using it you can move on. The specifics, such as syntax aren’t as important as you can look it up, but you can not lookup something you can’t name, nor will you be able to decide to look it up if you don’t understand when you’d want it.
I usually give the analogy of its kind of like being a chef and cooking stuff. At some point you can just do stuff via muscle memory, but until that kicks in you’d probably want a cookbook. You have the internet as your cookbook, and there’s too many pages to read completely, so you’ll need to know the name of the dish, what it tastes like before searching it up. The ingredients and steps are what you can just find when you need to cook it up. Once you make a given dish (or do something development wise) multiple times you start to memorize it automatically. Less important/one-off-stuff can always be looked up.
This method of focusing only on what you need to look stuff up and just raw practicing as you go along, will let you naturally remember important stuff (as you use it more and more) while letting you find stuff you don’t actually memorize.
Hope that helps!
Keep learning, keep growing, keep building ![]()
Hey,
You dont need to remember every single detail while learning to code. Just make sure you understand the main idea, review anything that feels confusing and its completely okay to move ahead even if you forget a few things.
Sometimes, just familiarizing yourself with new terms and so on is enough, especially if you’re just getting started. Personally, doing projects help me learn the best. I begin to understand the use cases better because my brain is linking certain concepts as solutions to remarkably frustrating issues. Find out what works best for you! It’s okay to look up stuff and ask others for help too as long as you’re not entirely relying on someone or something to copy paste solutions. Ultimately, all good if you really understand why you did what you did for your code. All the best ![]()
Welcome to the forum @Dio
Figure out why you want to code. This will help motivate you later on.
If you want to become proficient, then you’ll need to practice what you are learning to build muscle memory. For every hour spending studying, spend about four hours spread out over the following week building simple projects that use and combine the material you learnt.
Also, you could note down what you are learning. Just write a summary which you can reference whenever you get stuck. This will take time, but will allow you to process and retain what you are learning.
Using reference material, from notes or searching online from time to time as others have mentioned, is a part of coding, as you cannot retain all the information. For now focus on learning the basic structures as this will lay the foundation for the intermediate level of Python.
Happy coding