So I did just finish the Basic part, but the core challenges really kicked my butt. I basically got them by the skin of my teeth and modifying examples until they worked. The record collection and recursion ones were tough for me.
It feels the general pattern is the lessons are really easy and then they throw everything at you, expecting you to remember all the details in a project that’s an order of magnitude more complex.
Do most people just kind of fly through all these challenges? It seems to me that some of these topics would require a decent amount of practice to really grasp. Or is it just me?
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In my experience, the lessons are very basic and most of my actual learning comes from the certification projects. The lessons give you a basic idea of the syntax, but it’s up to you to determine how to use it. A lot of trial and error.
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Don’t worry, we were all there at the end.
If you understood javascript by now you wouldn’t need this website. You could just start applying for jobs right now!
Stay the course, you’ll get it.
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dont rush through the exercises. If you dont understand what you did then you should go through them again. the following lessons build on the last.
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I felt the same way. I finished that last night! I’m so glad I am not the only one that felt like that.
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It may be that this is just a very different type of learning that I’m used to. I’m a musician. When we learn something, we practice it over and over so we master it. Whereas these lessons are for the most part so easy that I’ll go through many of them without mastering anything. So when a difficult challenge comes, it’s all fuzzy.
I think it would be great if instead of one problem, each challenge came with more like five or ten. That would help solidify the concepts so much more.
I am actually working with A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript, which takes this way (three-page chapters with 20-question quizzes directly afterwards), which I think is great. The only problem is that it’s fairly basic and doesn’t cover a lot of things. It doesn’t do recursion at all. But what it does cover, I feel it teaches very well.
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No way! You’re a musician! I can totally relate to what you are talking about. I’m a total amateur but I do play the piano and teach it a little. And what you have said in the above, I definitely agree with. But as a lot of people have pointed out to me, google and other search engines are very helpful with looking closer at subjects.
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True… this seems more geared to acquainting you with the concept, then you have to fill it out with outside work.
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Everyone is telling me to go to college after this to get further into everything. We are just “skimming the tip of the ice berg” here.
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Where are you in your lessons now? You and I seem to be doing everything almost at the same time. We both joined two days from each other!
Oh, did we? Well, I just finished the Basic JavaScript today. I’m currently going back and studying the recursion lessons and trying to get a better grasp on them, and also looking for other recursion articles. It is starting to get clearer, but still fuzzy.
BTW I also use that book, A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript, and did about 70% of the Codecademy JavaScript lessons. At that point, it was getting a little complicated about using React or libraries (something like that I don’t remember), and I knew I needed to keep working on the basics.
I’m also continuing to work on CSS and websites, and I intend to gradually go back and work on my CSS/HTML projects, because right now they’re awful.
Cool! You know, I may be a few lessons ahead of you in freecodecamp but you have beat me by far in how much you have studied. I only heard of coding this January! I didn’t know there was such a thing. I don’t know much about computers.
That makes me wonder…is it possible for someone to truly learn coding if they are not very familiar with coding? I don’t even know exactly what kind of a laptop I am using. 
I’ll have to figure that one out.
Well, I think so. Most of this is new to me, too. This week I also did my first manual installation of WordPress, used Plesk at GoDaddy the first time, and created my first database! I also played around with Wix for the first time and used CSS in WordPress for the first time.
What’s interesting is that there is just so very much… stuff… to learn, to know. But no one was born knowing it, so as long as you keep learning, I’m sure you’ll get to where you need to be.
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I only use the challenges to see what a front-end developer expected to know so I can work with them better as the back-end programmer. Other than that, I usually use the knowledge I got from doing some of the challenges to contribute to projects lying around the internet.
I think working with others gives the most impact to know when not to use
the information you learned from this bootcamp, for me at least.
nah you have a good point
Maybe you can try creating side projects , then try applying what you have learned away from the freecodecamp website and see how it were to affect your webpages in a non controlling environment where your client want their website to look ,feel and work in certain way when they clearly have no understanding of the code behind it.
Did you complete the exercises?
