The exercises are hard

I have been learning javascript for about three months now and some exercises seem really hard to me. Sometimes I just cannot do any of them without copy pasting and I can’t understand how some of them might be useful for web development.

Learning to program is hard! Copy-pasting answers is just going to make it harder. When you get stuck, I recommend asking questions here on the forum and we’ll help you get un-stuck!

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But how can I use that code in web development, that’s what I am curious about.

Its hard to see until you have enough building blocks. Roughly speaking, HTML/CSS is about how a website looks while Javascript is all about what a website does. Any interactive component of a website is powered by Javascript. (roughly speaking)

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I feel the same way as you sometimes. There’s no problem looking at the answers, as long as you get back to the challenge and try to understand it’s not a problem.

It is far, far better to talk to people here on the forum than look up the answers and copy them. Starting to rely upon copying the answers will not help you learn how to solve problems on your own.

I think it’s important to really nail down the fundamentals. If you see that you’re having a lot of trouble with a particular lesson, go back to the lesson that you felt most comfortable and re-do the content following it. There is no shame in repeating content if it means you understand it better.

On that note, keep with it. If it was easy everyone would do it, but the facts are, coding/programming can be a hard concept to grasp, but I know you have what it takes to master it.

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I think I understand your ‘confusion’, with the way some challenges are presented. While this is probably not wholly accurate, I think we can generally break most challenges down into two main types of approach: fun/relatable, and abstract.

You will know you have ran into fun/relatable challenge formats when you see ‘Rick Astley’ or other pop culture references in the code/examples. Imo, these are usually used when they are trying to keep the mood ‘light’, and trying to make a potentially-complicated topic easier to digest.

You will know you are in a heavily abstracted challenge format when it ‘seems pointless’ or ‘arbitrary’. I believe when you run into these scenarios, it is so that you do not rely too heavily on ‘real world’ or ‘anecdotal’ reference, and rather fully absorb the underlying concept(s). Outside of FCC, you might see a lot of coders helping each other while using things like foo and bar for variable names. This is much along the same lines.

So, for instance, if you run into a challenge asking you to count odd numbers backwards from hiNumber and lowNumber and that seems rather silly - I could not agree more! The exercise here isn’t memorizing how to count backwards, it’s about getting practices manipulating data with things like Math.random() and .length, etc.

What JeremyLT said about ‘until you have enough building blocks’ is spot-on. Usually the challenges themselves, individually, are irrelevant, but when you start internalizing the ‘skills’ the challenges impart, you will start having ‘lightbulb’ moments where it starts making more sense, as a whole.

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I mean, depends on what “some of them” are.
But generally, in web-development you are dealing with complex frameworks and depending on which one you are using, they are highly different.
Their point is to save time and make content much more flexible - but in return needing a lot of coding to do so.
They will include layouts and templates which you can build and influence using all kinds of JavaScript functions, methods and objects.

If you don’t know where the journey could go and got way to much time to spare: FCC has a video on vue.js: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4deVCNJq3qc

I’ve followed that one through and it was quite interesting to see. And it’s just an intro.

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