Excuse my English here. It’s not my native language.
In (2020?) I discovered Freecodecamp and its 8,000+ tutorials. At that time my dream was to become a front-dev and I needed HTML & CSS for that, so I spend 300 hours on the Responsive Web Design Certificate except learning them took like a year as I was busy with high school.
then during Summer Vacations, I was doing Static websites with HTML & CSS only and I also contributed to some Github repos. I was so proud about this compared to (2019?) where I was learning JS for visuals in Khan Academy.
But this is where things went a bit complicated just like every dream ever.
it’s the programming part. Since HTML & CSS are not real programming languages, learning JS was like hitting a big rock with a stick repeatedly out of frustration.
Specifically, the JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures Certificate because the last time I ever used JS was like a couple of years ago. I still know the fundamental stuff like while-loop, if-else, strings, vars (except OOP). After finishing Basic JavaScript on Freecodecamp and then getting in deep with ES6 and knowing about DOM manipulation on scribble and how it works and I even did like a tasbih counter in codepen
After I finished their course I decided to do projects, and that’s the issue
I learned about strings, var, while-loop, if-else. But when and how do I use them in projects?
For example, I wanted to do a to-do list webpage, the HTML & CSS weren’t hard to deal with. but the JS side. I was completely lost. “Wait how do I make JS ‘target’ the input value when the user types in <input>”
“What should I use here?”
“Why do I have to use an empty array in this situation?”
“Why do these lines of code make no sense to me?”
“Why do I get PTSD whenever I see a couple of lines of JS code that I don’t understand?”
This is when I realized that “if I can’t do a simple project from the internet then what can I do?”
At that point, I was totally lost and didn’t know how to level up my JS.
Fast-forward a couple of months later due to high school exams, I read about a blog from Quincy Larson which is about Learn Responsive Web Design by Building 20 Projects
Which is less about reading stuff that you’re unsure about and more about coding and then “Aha!” moment because you understood what pseudo-CSS means for example. I was wondering if the same is gonna happen for JavaScript Algorithms & Data Structures certification. because I’m having trouble understanding it despite knowing about the fundamental stuff.
We will finish building the updated JavaScript Algorithms & Data Structures certification in 2022. And we will publish the updated Front End Libraries certification after that.
Alright now I have to decide something while waiting for that updated JavaScript Algorithms & Data Structures certification which were 3 options:
1- Learn about algorithms & programming through CS50
2- contribute to open source projects
3- both
I was thinking of the first one so I can know about programming as a whole and then learn JS after, so I would know what that line code does and what does what.
Will that end up a waste of time later down the line? or should I just go for it and see what happens?