What's your learning process with the courses?

1

Hi everyone, I’m about five days in and curious how others here are taking in the content.

I’m starting with HTML/CSS and have been trying a few different ways to learn and apply what I’m learning.

I tried coding along with Mosh but found that there may another optimal way. By the time I got to the exercises, I was having to backtrack which in my opinion is more than fine. It helped me grasp the concepts even more.

What I’m trying now is to watch the entire session curriculum without coding along at first. I’ll re-watch it but this time, coding along before finally reaching the exercise portion.

I realise this adds more time in learning but it’s nominal, just the first watch period and to be honest, I’m replaying some lessons before moving on to the next one.

I know there are many ways to go about this and at the end of the day, how everyone goes about it different to suit your learning style but I’d appreciate hearing what worked for you and of course what didn’t work.

Thanks!

Davide

2

Usually I’ll take detailed notes as i follow along since that helps me retain the info a little better, but during the exercises if i need further clarification instead of video hopping ill sometimes consult to google lol. if i get really stuck, I just cheat and look at his code and compare to figure out what i got wrong/was missing.

3

That’s really useful!

I thought about taking notes too but since the curriculum is always available, they’re technically notes that are already written and easier to reference. Google had definitely been my friend too when needing further clarification on subjects, just recently searched rem VS px VS % :smirk:

Referencing his code in comparison is definitely a must!

4

When i’m going through i’m not taking notes but coding along with him in visual studio. I end up making mistakes along the way and have to figure out what i did differently to make it not work so i end up spending a lot more time on it. However i realize it’s helping me with debugging seeing what causes what kinds of problems. if it’s something interesting i’ll mess around with the values. I may need to go back through the vids again at some point to take more detailed notes though, but there are many different ways to learn.

5

Here is what I recommend:

  • write things down (not everything but technical words and their meaning)
  • skim (it’s normal to not understand everything at once. So, skim i.e, fast forward the lecture just to get an idea of the content/topic!).
  • now this is a bit interesting part: understand the problem thoroughly before working on it. write the algorithm in bullet format (step by step explanation of the solution and then code based on that algorithm).
  • Once you have written a solution, try to find a way to optimize it.
  • Also, look for edge cases to handle.

That is all!
GOOD LUCK and ALL THE BEST

2 Likes
6

Writing things down seems to help - in my case I have a notes.md file open in another window (usually 1 .md file per section of a course). This also provided an opportunity for me to learn markdown pretty quickly.

It’s labor intensive and it takes longer to get through each video as I’m constantly pausing to add to the markdown file. The thing is, he isn’t lying when he says:

I don’t waste time going over the same things…I’ve structured this course very carefully…etc.

What I understand him to mean by this is e.g., he might show how you can split a string up into an array of the individual letters of the string using "" as the delimiter, but he’s not going to then show 4 other delimiters you could use instead of "". It’s like classes and objects - he is teaching us the cookie cutter, but not wasting our time waiting for 4 dozen different kinds of cookies to come out of the oven. He’ll make a few cookies to make another important point, say, related to polymorphism or inheritance - but then that’s it - you won’t be seeing him make that same point again. If you miss it, you’ve missed it.

Obviously he does repeat some things - it’s the nature of teaching.

The constructor function of an object was the function used to create that object…etc.

The problem is, nearly everything he does say is important and essential, and so it can be frustrating stopping every 30 seconds to update notes :slight_smile:

But when I write the notes in the .md file, I use my own words and if I can’t get it written out to where it makes sense - that means I still don’t understand it. Whenever I would tell a professor “Yeah, I understand it, (really believing I did) I just can’t find the right words to use when writing out the answer…” - same thing going on, as professor would just smile at me, knowing I still didn’t really understand it lol.

After the courses, I’ve found I have to just dive in and start coding something. Gemini/chat bots are your friends - ask them to give you some beginner/advanced, whatever, project ideas using X language - they come up with some good exercises.

As a writer, the hardest thing to look at is a blank page. Now my new blank page is a vscode window with 3 files in it, and I’m staring at the blank index.js or index.html, wuteva

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