Does anyone know a way to keep everything fresh in your head, while continuing through basic courses?
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Do a lot of exercises, build little mini web page using what you just learn. Don’t worry about building an actual web page, be comfortable in writing code is the objective.
focus on understanding and familiarising with how things work
if you don’t remember something google it - learning to google is the most useful skill as developer you can learn
An avoidable mistake I made early on was not applying course skills in slightly different ways through projects. By building different things with the skills you learn in a course, you can challenge yourself to solve issues that will come up. You will apply knowledge more than you would if you were just typing along, or worse copying/pasting the code. Really helps to solidify understanding of course material.
Lucasl, how? I finished the Basic HTML lessons and am about 1/3 of the way through Basic CSS. I would love to practice on other projects and work on applying this outside of the lessons, but I don’t know where to do it? Do I go to a certain website, do I have to buy something…? (I feel like such a noobie even asking)
Where do I go to start making these mini websites?
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Once you get done with the CSS section, to build a mini website, is to literally build a website from scratch from what you learned. You don’t go through any other sites or buy anything, you just build it out in a code editor and that’s about it.
Now the hardest thing would be to come up with an idea on what you want to build. A good starting point is taking something that interests you and just make a website out of that, using everything that you learned from the curriculum. Now if that still is too daunting, you can always look up youtube tutorials on making websites using html/css, follow along, try to understand on what’s going on. And after you get a good grasp on that, you can start making your own websites and such.
Another side note as well, if you go through all the lessons on the responsive design course here, there will be projects section to where you will build out websites, so that’s another end goal to get to as well.
Where do I get/find... a "code editor"?
Popular ones out there are vscode, atom, sublime, etc. You can search online for others if you’d like, doesn’t really matter which one you choose, they all do the same thing, just don’t use your built in notepad. With me I use vscode, so it just all comes down to personal preference on which code editor you want to use.
I think the confusion here is that FCC doesn’t tell you how to build a website from scratch.
You are learning a lot of syntax but no practical experience.
This is what you do.
Type this inside a text file and name it index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My first website.</title>
</head>
<body>
Hello me.
</body>
</html>
Once you don’t that. Save it and open the file by double clicking it. You got a website.
From there you can experiment and do what you will.
You could either use codepen or make from scratch like others have said. Codepen can be helpful since you get auto refreshing preview of what you’re doing without much work.
Examples of what I mean:
- If the section teaches how to insert images, try making a small image grid of 4 pics or adding a picture and giving it a border or something
- If section goes over flexbox, try to copy the basic layout of a website of your choosing using divs w/ borders
Admittedly, this will probably be better advice later on when you get a handle of the basics since going off track from what youre doing inside the course will be easier. For now, though, it could still help you get some extra practice
Also, early on video tutorials can be pretty helpful too (tons of free beginner stuff on YouTube). Don’t feel limited to just using FCC coursework when learning the basics.