Before I begin Free Code Camp, I have inquiries

For starters, I’d like to dedicate the next 6 months of my time to coding & Free Code Camp, I plan spend 8-12 hours a day doing just that.

As a complete beginner, I’m considering reading Jon Duckett’s HTML and CSS book in full before I begin the HTML and CSS section of Free Code Camp & his Javascript and JQuery book before Free Code Camp’s JQuery and Javascript sections & so on hoping it’ll give me a sense of familiarity & make my time on each section of the curriculum just a bit easier.

Thoughts? Any and all advice is welcome. Thanks!

Do the codecademy courses(html/css) rather. These will give you a taste of what it’s all about. Or just jump right into FCC, you’ll be fine!

Obviously all sorts of people learn all sorts of ways, but here is my 10c…

As a complete beginner you’ll find a tonne of jargon pretty quickly and the practical application may not be clear from just reading. I’m not familiar with the book you mentioned, but I know the book I learned with had me doing a lot of hands-on stuff straight away anyway. You might find you don’t need to do the HTML/CSS challenges at all in that case! (I didn’t really need to do them, I just liked racking up easy brownie points).

If I were starting from scratch, I’d just jump straight into the FCC challenges and only refer to the book to consolidate what I’d learned that day. Same with the JavaScript.

The things I like about the FCC challenges is that you can just start, right now. You don’t need to research and pick an editor to write in, you don’t need to keep refreshing a browser to see changes. And, you get instant feedback on your work. Books are a good resource, but a little too abstract for me as the first port of call for learning to code.

You’ll get better at coding by coding everyday - the reading might help things stick, but diving straight in is the best experience I’ve found.

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Agreed with the others.

Jump straight in and start coding.

Read those books while you lie in bed at night to reinforce what you worked on that day in FCC.

Reading books is great, but nothing helps me learn as quickly as getting my hands dirty. You’ll also be more motivated by the progress you’re making as you work through the challenges!

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