At What Point Do Your Eyes Stop Glazing Over?
Progress being made but Loops and Arrays are still confusing, though I *think* I understand them conceptually.
On one hand, I can be proud that I’m keeping up with my efforts to learn how to code — I’ve chosen JavaScript as my first language to get proficient in — but on the other, I think I’ve reached the Valley of Despair. Allow me to explain why though I’ve been making progress, my eyes glaze over when reading about each concept.
Codecademy has been helpful in teaching me the concepts and at first, the lessons were exciting and easily understandable. Then things got a bit more complicated with the discussion about Conditionals, Loops, Arrays and now Iterators. Conceptually I believe I understand why you’d use these coding options and I can probably decipher what a particular set of code should do. However, when it comes to taking instructions in a Codecademy exercise and writing it out in a terminal, this is where things get hairy.
I’m finding that as I read through the lengthy description of what different Loop or Array does, my eyes have a habit of glazing over. My interest has been lost, yet I still soldier on. Is there some time when you start to code that this doesn’t happen? Perhaps it’s that the instructions and explanation of what a programming item is aren’t exactly clear and helpful? Or, it could be that after just doing one exercise and moving on, this isn’t sufficient to properly help one understand the concept.
This is the limitation one gets with Codecademy, though I can’t necessarily fault the company for it. The service does offer additional tutorials such as side projects and quizzes but you have to pay for the access. I’m not quite settled with paying Codecademy the $19.99 monthly subscription to make that leap.
I’m right now 38 percent of the way through this 30-hour JavaScript course. Do I feel confident in my abilities to start coding in the language? No way. What’s still unclear to me is what I’m going to actually build with this language after learning it. It’s helpful to have this knowledge in the back of my mind but being able to practice it would be great. Maybe that’s another goal for me to set as part of this journey: What the heck do I do with this capability?
Also, can someone explain what JavaScript can do versus another programming language?
