Does anyone else hate learnyoumongo?

I’m sorry to be a complainer but good grief! There have to be better mongo tutorials out there. The directions for learnyoumongo are totally opaque and useless, the examples aren’t applicable to the exercises, etc, I have used mongo many times for projects etc and I still can’t figure out how to complete the learnyoumongo challenges without cheating and looking at the solutions. Can’t we do something better?

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I went through part of it and had computer issues, so I had to start over. I decided that since that particular set of exercises are not required to be completed that I would just start on the API projects and figure it out along the way.

I really found all the learnyouXXX to be a bit frustrating. And while they sometimes provided me with some background, I’m not sure that I really learned all too much from them.

Anyhow, I’m now a little more than halfway through the API projects and they have called for the use of mongo, so I have been fumbling through learning the database. However, I feel that since I am actually applying it, that I am gaining a better understanding of how it works. Like all things it is about practicing it, which you get a bit of in the API projects.

If you search the FCC forums for ‘learnyou’, you will see that there are many people who share this discontentment with the ‘learnyou’ exercises. There may even be some info about future plans in some of those threads, but I don’t recall.

Yes, I understand how to use Mongo. I found learnyoumongo itself frustrating because the instructions are unclear. In particular, it is difficult to figure out what criteria they’re judging the solutions by, etc. I personally think that simply including a tutorial in the curriculum like the one you linked to be a way better option.

After looking around the forum a little more, I see that I’m not the only one. But I was kind of over-reacting. I did the learnyounode exercises a while back but now I remember being frustrated with those as well.

Starting the mongo tutorial now and … yep, it’s opaque as h–l.

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Currently using this tutorial. Much the less hate

I think FCC is leaving all of those learn node workshop behind as it is any. I finished them up but haven’t started on the backend projects. I’m waiting to see how the new curriculum looks.

Stephen Grider’s course over at Udemy is pretty solid:

https://www.udemy.com/the-complete-developers-guide-to-mongodb/learn/v4/overview.

One thing to watch out for with Mongo courses, though, is that many of them are actually Mongoose courses. They don’t teach you database administration or the Mongo command line tool.

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You make an excellent point there. The current freeCodeCamp Backend Exercises are far from perfect but they point you in the right direction, as with any of the other projects you’ll have to do outside research to complete them. Complaining about it doesn’t fix anything - I’m curious about what beta brings to back-end - I haven’t taken a lot of time to look at it yet.

Making freeCodeCamp Perfect is something that Campers can come together to make possible. The people working on GitHub - freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp: freeCodeCamp.org's open-source codebase and curriculum. Learn to code for free. are making progress at an impressive speed.

For the people saying they “hate” an exercise or set of exercises let’s work together as campers to improve the exercises and make them perfect :slight_smile:

Making freeCodeCamp Perfect is something that Campers can come together to make possible.

Can they, though? Creating high quality learning materials takes a lot of time and expertise. Students cannot do this for themselves, although they can certainly help each other.

As a teacher, I find the idea that a coding education should be free kind of irritating. Good teachers deserve to be paid for their work (like anyone else), and freeCodeCamp students who make the grade can expect to be well paid themselves in the long run.

Sorry for the rant.

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Take a look at the guides project (https://guide.freecodecamp.org/ GitHub - freeCodeCamp/guide: A collection of easy-to-understand guides to programming tools) - it was put together by campers and is a great learning resource :slight_smile:

I think @arw2015’s point was that someone who needs to learn Mongo is not in the best position to write a better Mongo curriculum than learnyoumongo.

Of course campers can teach each other, but they can’t teach something they don’t yet know :slight_smile:

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I agree! If you put your mind to something, you can put together a guide on a subject you don’t understand by going over the documentation and taking notes and then later organizing those notes into a guide that everyone can use.

Certainly we can do better than the current resources. I image that is always the case no matter the resource. I mean, we are self-taught developers - it’s kinda what we do. We should have definitely have the mindset you describe!

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That’s understand, the campers complaining though should learn another way then improve the way they tried to learn.

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