I’ve been doing FreeCodeCamp now for about 3 months and while I can get through the challenges easy enough by looking at examples and checking through the forums. I feel like I’m more just copy and pasting what I see rather then actually learning the concepts. I"m not sure how much of the information I"m actually retaining with this method. Does anyone have some good supplemental learning sources in particular looking for stuff that covers CSS, flexbox and JavaScript…
This is a great source: https://developer.mozilla.org/
Other than that you can google how things work and try solving things on your own, or asking for hints from others creating your own thread, instead of finding the solutions in the forum
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Sounds familiair. I’ve been learning in several different places before I got the feeling that I started to understand the underlying concepts.
Here are some sites to look at:
https://www.smashingmagazine.com
There are several others. Just Google them.
https://stackoverflow.com
https://www.theodinproject.com
https://www.w3schools.com
https://www.udemy.com
https://javascript.info
The above posters provide a good amount of extra learning sources.
But because you feel like your “just copy and pasting” then reading more sources wont really change that. I always say learning requires some struggle, or some failure. Otherwise you only learn 1 way of many of “how to do things”, if you aren’t running into bugs, issues, or struggling to do something, you probably aren’t learning anything at all. Unless you plan to memorize the exact way to do everything (which is impossible), you are going to forget, and thus run into issues later. Now, how you deal with those issues is where the experience of overcoming issues comes in.
So, if you wanted to, skip the rest of the lessons and start on the challenges right now. This way you will be forced to learn the concepts to finish the projects. Depending on which project we are talking about, you might need to learn new approaches, and technologies among other things. At that point, going thru the challenges will guide you to (possibly) new solutions.
Since the goal of FCC is for you to learn the concepts to become a developer, why not just start trying to be a developer? You will run into things you don’t know, but being able to overcome those short comings, by going thru FCC challenges, or external sources, you gain that key experience of overcoming things you don’t know, or remember. FCC’s value lies in the journey, not the results, the journey of learning what’s out there thru challenges, and applying what you learned to build stuff.
This way you don’t really need to remember how you did something in a challenge, just remember what’s possible so you can learn how to use it later during the projects, and search for the how later. (Google is your friend 
)
Goodluck, keep building and keep learning