As we all know FCC loves to throw us into projects and make us learn along the way. This is great as we get to research and try out stuff, but sometimes I feel completely lost on how to achieve something. This is when I start searching StackOverflow or blogs for solutions. A lot of the time I can’t understand how to do what they did and just end up copying the code and modifying it a bit, which means my project works but I don’t learn much.
My question is: how do I learn new + difficult concepts without just copying code or feeling lost?
I think all the confusion comes because FCC throws examples to beginners projects that contain stuff that has not been covered by the lessons or will never be.
I do not know why they are doing that. Maybe they are too lazy to produce something with the stuff that is covered or they really stick to the order that your are NOT ALLOWED to look/user the example Code.
So maybe all your confusion might be gone when you just grap the project IDEA from the examples and will never look to the code. From my point of view, you most probably should have enough matter from the lessons to produce something that complies with the requirements. Your solution will be ugly and minor to the example but it does what it is most probably supposed to do.
If you are still lost: Go to the MAP and go through all the lessons you already have taken and ask yourself which part of it you might use.
Adn don’t waste time on design. Grasp the concepts behind. And you are fine!
First i presume by projects you are referring to things like make a profile page or build a Tic Tac Toe game. Sound like you are doing most things right eg searching for answers and trying out the code that you find. But as you point out your not understanding the code that you end up using, which results in you not really learning.
A this point you should be posting with specific questions … and someone should be able to break the code down and make it clearer and help you understand it better.
I go through the same problems you find your self in … i then google till i find a solution or solutions then i use them and debug them till i understand what the code dose. A large part of my time is debugging and this really really helps me understand how the code works.
Also when i complete a challenge (not doing projects yet want to learn more javascript first) i then search this site to look at others solutions, and learn other ways to do the same thing and if i don’t understand there solution from looking at it i go off and debug that till i have worked out what there code those different to mine.
Why not post here part of a project you completed with a section you used that you don’t understand and see if you get some help understanding it.
Actually the problem lies is blindly copying the code, you shouldn’t do that unless you know each and every line of the code someone else has written and why it is behaving the way it is behaving,dig into it a bit more, to the point where you can take that piece of code and modify it at your own will according to your requirement.This happens to every one even experience developers where they can’t seem to figure out how something is implemented, trying to figure it out googling stuff or checking out few code snippets of its implementation doesn’t make you less of a developer. Just understand the mechanism so that you can use it anytime or anyway you want that’s the key.
Actually I noticed FCC does ask for things in projects that have not been covered in the lessons. An example of that is the nav bar on the portfolio project. I noticed people have bootstrap nav code in their code but non of that was discussed .So I’m guessing people are either researching the bootstrap nav code and adding it copy and paste, do create fancy nav bars.