How long do you recommend I stay on a single problem before quitting forever? How does anyone learn programming? I just cried and took a frustration nap. Someone has literally put something written down in another language in front of me, then asked me to read the unknown language. Is my only path forward to keep guessing until I get it correct? Is this conducive to learning? Does everyone learn like this?
I even found a forum post with the solution removed by a moderator. Why? Is this hell?
I’ve tried to learn programming before and I ended up getting so frustrated I quit. I’m trying again, and I am again heading down the same path. I’m not sure for how much longer I can continue to bang my head against a brick wall and still learn absolutely nothing.
there’s a handy ‘get help’ button which looks like a ? which will appear in the challenge if you try 3 times and fail to solve it. It will open a template with your code pasted in (or a comment showing you how to paste it in yourself) and a link to the challenge and it includes a spot for asking a question. once you’ve filled it out and submittted it, it comes here, ready for us to review it and help you.
another tip is google stuff you don’t know or don’t understand
for eg “how do I write an html target attribute” should give you many examples
to post code on the forum follow the post instructions below
When you enter a code block into a forum post, please precede it with a separate line of three backticks and follow it with a separate line of three backticks to make it easier to read.
You can also use the “preformatted text” tool in the editor (</>) to add backticks around text.
I now understand how the help button helps me create a post on the forum.
I think I also understand how to use the backticks.
I don’t understand how to use the preformatted text in the editor to add backticks, but that doesn’t sound like such a huge loss. I can manually type six backticks easily enough.
Now, that other piece of advice you added: Google it, basically. I copy/pasted the instructions of the problem and found a freecodecamp article that gave me:
<a href="website-link-goes-here" target="_blank">
Which is basically the solution. Each time I get stuck, will this be the solution? Google it until I find the answer? It feels cheap. Like I didn’t actually solve anything, I just googled the answer. It seems like it would be easier to simply include this example in the curriculum itself, rather than having someone copy/paste the problem into google and finding the example through there. That’s kind of weird. Is that part of the curriculum trying to teach me that I’ll have to rely on Google a lot? I’m almost more frustrated that the solution was something so simple: Just ask Google.
Thanks for taking the time, sorry if I’m spewing venom. I hate this.
well, the curriculum did explain attributes in an earlier step. So you could have reviewed those till you found the step that talks about attributes (you created the href attribute that way after all)
given that it is hard to recall every detail you read though, you could have asked here (you did). Normally someone would have suggested adding the target attribute next to the href at that point (but since you had multiple questions, I decided to go another route).
finally, and I believe the best way for this, is to simply google it.
And no I don’t mean to google the answer for the specific fcc exercise, but rather just to google “how do I add an html attribute target”.
This is perfectly normal for a developer. Most of us don’t have the ability to remember details of every language we know. So we either have reference books on our shelves, or we bookmark a good reference website or we just google things.
Once you’ve coded in a specific language for a good period of time, you will not need to google as much for the small stuff (like adding attributes for html) but more for weird details (like what’s the charset to use for dutch - don’t worry if you don’t know what I mean, you will one day).
also I forgot one thing, even though we don’t allow solutions on the forum, that doesn’t mean that you can’t look through other posts and learn from the questions/answers. You’d be surprised how much information there is here.
