when you're learning to code do you ever feel like you're stuck learning the same thing over and over again? you might ….. and by the end you feel like you kind of get it but when the next day rolls around you've no clue how any of it works anymore so you have to go back and re-watch the tutorial but unfortunately this pattern keeps repeating you might feel like none of this knowledge is actually sticking in your brain and it can get very frustrating to feel like you're not getting anywhere so in this …. I'm going to cover some common pitfalls that might be tripping you up and causing you to waste time when you're learning to code now as a disclaimer keep in mind that there are no magical shortcuts that will transform you overnight into a coding expert I know,
even with good learning techniques it's still
going to take time to go from a beginner developer to a more advanced one
alright let's get into the tips the first one is don't learn things randomly
figure out a road map to follow if you're jumping around trying to learn git
one day CSS custom properties the next and JavaScript promises on the third you
may be setting yourself up for a lot of hardship instead of picking things at
random to learn look for a structured path that you can follow one path you can
use is a video on my channel called learn web development for absolute
beginners it shows you a simplified roadmap of the main skills that you'll need
to learn and the order to learn them in you can also go through an online boot
camp curriculum like Free Code Camp, Zero to Mastery or Anya Kobo’s 12 hour boot
camp on HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The benefit of following a
pre-made path is that you'll know what you need to learn and when and as you go
from one step to the next you'll be able to see your progress and feel like
you're actually getting somewhere now as you're following your path you might
be tempted to try to learn multiple things at the same time in order to get
through everything more quickly but doing this may actually divide your
attention and make it harder for that knowledge to stick so tip number two is
don't try to learn everything all at once but focus on learning one thing at a
time I recommend staying on one subject until you feel you have a decent grasp
of the basics at least when you're starting out for example let's say you're
learning html first once you feel like you know most of the common tags and can
build a very basic html web page you can move on to learning CSS then in the
future if you come across an html tag that you're not familiar with you can
take some time to learn about that specific tag tip number three be an active
learner don't just passively consume content
sitting back and watching an instructor go through the material without trying
anything yourself is not going to get you very far instead try to do some
combination of taking a new information and then trying it yourself in real
life for example I went through Wes Bos's CSS grid course back when I was first
learning about grid what I did was I would watch the video and try to code
along with wes through the lessons if I didn't fully understand something I
would go back and watch it again and after each lesson I would pause the course
and try to build the lesson examples on my own without looking back as much as
possible this trying to create what you've just learned without looking at the
source code is a great way to see how much you actually remember and it'll very
quickly help you identify the weak points in your knowledge so you can then go back
and fill it in after the course was done I felt like I had a basic grasp of CSS
grid but I wouldn't consider myself an expert by any definition and I think
that's okay because I could try to use grid when building website layouts and
if I ever got stuck
on anything I could refer back to the course
or other resources like Mozilla Developer Network learning new skills and
coding is a combination of learning the knowledge and putting it into practice
which brings me to tip number four don't just memorize stuff remember back in
school when you were learning vocabulary words and history dates you might have
studied lists of facts and memorized them so that you could regurgitate them
for tests and quizzes now I'm not here to debate the pros and cons of rote memorization
however trying to learn html by just memorizing lists of all the html tags is
not going to be very effective coding is an applicable skill not just a
collection of abstract facts obviously you do need to be able to remember
things in order to use them but you're going to learn flex box a lot faster if
you explore all the different properties by playing around in a code pen for a
day or two as opposed to just memorizing
the definition of flex grow no web developer
is going to know everything off the top of their head I can attest to this as
someone who worked in the industry for a long time and worked with other
professional developers we all used Google or Duck Duck Go if you care about
your privacy to look up stuff constantly in a way Stack Overflow, MDN, and CSS
Tricks become kind of like an extension of your brain the goal of all this is
to be able to build websites and if you need to look up stuff along the way
that's perfectly fine everyone does it and that brings me to tip number five
build stuff I know everyone says this but it really is the best way to learn
coding watching tutorials and going through courses is the beginning not the
end of learning web development at my first web dev. job I would be given a
project like building a landing page
with a button and getting it to submit to a
database now since this was my job I had to build it I didn't really have a
choice and oftentimes I'll be given a task that I had no idea how to do scary
right the only solution was to jump right in and try my best I would look stuff
up and try things on my own and ask for help when I really was stuck even
though the process of figuring this all out may have been very painful at times
it was all worth it in the end when I got to look at my finished website and this
is one big benefit of learning by building projects having a tangible goal in
front of you is great because when you reach it you'll feel like you've really
achieved something if you're looking for project ideas don't worry because
there are tons of them on the internet search for things like "JavaScript
project ideas" or "react
project ideas" you get the picture and
personally I always recommend FrontendMentor.io for front-end projects that are
also great additions to your portfolio I've built a few Frontend Mentor
projects on my channel and if you're interested you can check out Building a
Responsive Website from Scratch and more recently, Building a Social Media
Dashboard with a Dark/Light Toggle and if you do watch these don't forget to
code along with me as you watch anyway if you're currently learning to thanks