Passive learning

i been watching this youtuber who is a self trained programmer andy serkovitz. and he mention you wont learn to be a good programmer from passive learning. meaning watching videos on youtube. he believe u only get real good by struggling through projects. i can sorta see his point in this. i noticed theres some free 10 hours classes on youtube thats sponsored by FCC. are those worth watching or no? i appreiate some of you guys feedback on this. I try not to cheat even on our challenges by looking at the solutions. but when i cant even figure out step 1, i will take peak and try to learn by reverse engineering.

Can you be a good surgeon if all you do is study books, and never apply what you’ve learned?
On the other hand, are you a surgeon if all you have is knowledge on how to use tools without foundation knowledge?

Likewise it’s an engineer.
You need both an hands on experience on what you are doing, as well as why you are doing it.

So you need to know both the “why” and the “how”.

Good luck and happy coding :sunny:

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thank you that is a very good answer. i actualy am a electrical engineering graduate but i never advanced beyond completion of my degree because i spent most of tnhe time doing the homework passing the exams which mainly consist of theoretical calculations and math and didnt put much effort into the applying what i learn by spending my free time building circuits.

Well, there it is! :slight_smile:

You know already that you need a good balance of both.
And also remember that there’s no “correct order” of learning: you can very well start by building stuff because it’s fun.
Just remember to fix your foundation later by studying the theory behind what you just built.

My conclusion is to not look too much into what’s “best”, but go for what you actually enjoy, as that will be a better motivation.
Just remember to do it with the proper awareness.

Hope this helps.

im actually working on the tutorials and the design projects at the end. im enjoying the JS section so far, althought some of the challenges are pretty challenging i need to look at the solutions just to get an idea what to do. i eventually love to dwelve into doing other projects but at this point i just cant think of any projects now. i think i will look for a book that shows some project recommendations since well creativity has never been my biggest feat.

A simple google search made me land over this resource, and it looks awesome!

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ooh thanks alot. i will bookmark that

try to avoid that, you should avoid looking at solutions before solving the algorithm on your own first

if you are stuck, ask on the forum

I suggest you redo all algorithms for which you looked at the solutions

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thanks for the suggestion. i redid all the algorithms i looked on the solutions

I would suggest that “passive learning” is an oxymoron. Learning is active.

When watching videos it is up to you how active the learning will be. If all you do is watch the video and have no code interaction, usage, or knowledge transfer to something practical (like a solution to a problem you have in some project) then I think the net gain of watching the video is minimal. I’m sure if you watch enough videos some things might stick but you will find it very hard to use the knowledge. You might think you know something but then when you go and try to apply that knowledge it turns out you don’t really know it.

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Yeah, when I was learning, I loved coding a long with videos. But I also learned a lot from just watching videos. Sometimes I would “passively” watch without coding and then decide to go back and code along. Other times I felt that I had absorbed the concepts well enough that I didn’t need to go over it again - this was usually only the case if the subject was not entirely new to me. It also depends on how well I wanted to know it - Was this something that I needed to know well for my next project? Or was this something with which I wanted to be familiar, know I could find the specifics in the docs, and just wanted to understand the idea?

Find what works for you. But I agree with the others that a mix is good. If I had to guess at the mix, for me it was probably 10-20% “hands-off” learning. And then once I got my job, there was a lot of reading through documentation before I went to bed, with a keyboard nowhere in site.

I like watching tec videos as well even if it is “passive”. But then it’s more a form of infotainment and I have no real expectation about what I am learning. It may or may not stick, but at least I’m entertained by something mildly intellectually stimulating as opposed to just binge-watching some random TV show.

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