I am struggling with CSS. I am struggling with it for quite some time. I can make some simple designs with boostrap and stuff. But don’t really seem to have the kind of mastery, even after a few months, that some other campers seem to have. They make beautiful webpages and I make very simplistic pages. That’s bugging me for some time.
By the way I was never good at UI design. Something’s not right with my right brain, it seems. I don’t even see the difference between (supposedly) attractive and ugly websites. (Both seem same to me.)
I have two comments which are a little contradictory, so pick the one you like best
It seems that you are struggling with your UI design skills, not your UI development skills. They are related, but different, and in most organizations with more than a handful of web folks there’s often a split between designer and developer, and FCC is really focusing on the development part rather than design part. So maybe it’s not something to be fixed. Acknowledge what you’re good at, what you like doing, and stick with that. If you want more practice with development skills and CSS, look at other web pages (not the code, just the rendered page) and see if you can copy it. Having said that…
You could learn some design skills If you read only one book on design, read [The Non-Designer’s Design Book] (http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-4th/dp/0133966151) by Robin Williams. It’s not web-specific, but the fundamentals are the same for all media, and once you understand the four simple principles in there you’ll find yourself spotting good & bad design everywhere!
Currently the Truncate string algorithm in the basic algorithm scripting. I keep searching online and sometimes I see other campers solutions but I don’t want to cheat. I ask basic questions in Gitter. I want to get this. I am really struggling but like you said @iheartkode“when you are struggling you are learning”. Just doesn’t seem that way…
My biggest struggle by learning JS is, that it’s “hard to read”. Can’t explain it better. Coming from Ruby/Rails (junior level) it’s hard to read that syntax.
I agree with everyone who has expressed what is now summed up as Javascript Fatigue.
The massive speed at which the wider Javascript ecosystem has spawned frameworks, packages, libraries, conventions, preferences - and blog posts - since HTML5 and Node exploded together, really is this two-edged sword:
On one hand, it got both newbies and veterans excited about web and full-stack development. We all flocked to the new world in droves over the last two or three years.
But on the other hand, existing experienced developers had such a headstart on everyone else that they took the new capabilities the ecosystem now afforded them and ran away with it, as fast as they could… leaving the newbies amongs us doomed to play an impossible catch-up game.
The current generation is doing their utmost to outpace the next one.
Everyone wants to create the next React, or the next full-stack all-in-one solution.
Again, I love it to bits, it’s amazing and exciting. But I feel sorry for myself and everyone else who has to try and get a grip of new technologies literally on a monthly basis.
Anyway, that’s my main gripe these days.
Other than that, I’d just love to have more time to practice, since I can’t do it at my work.
Oh and, did I mention that I hate styling? CSS, layouts, pretty flex boxes and fonts and all that visual stuff… I’m terribly inapt at those.
I have four hobgoblins that tend to come out and play at the most inopportune moments. The first one is regular expressions. I realize that using them will save me multiple lines of code, but they look so strange to me.
The second one comes from my difficulty in organizing my CSS. Should I use BEM, OOCSS, SMACSS? How do I use these things with a pre-processor?
Then there’s analysis paralysis. The condition that grinds all work to a dead halt because you are too busy determining what library / framework / build tool is the best to use for a given project.
Finally, I also have ADD, which for me means that I have to fight the urge to chase squirrels and post on forums, when I should be writing code(lol).
It is an uphill struggle. I am doing Coursera WebDev specialization in parallel to FCC.
I was so happy learning HTML and CSS, everything looked so logical and I had great fun creating pages. Than came JavaScript and I managed some basic thing.
Now I came to CSS preprocessors and when I learned that even CSS can have variables and stuff like functions my hearth sunk. It feels like not learning one thing but learning 10 things all at the same time.
There is an excellent course on Algorithms on Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/course/algo) taught by Stanford University. It’s challenging but very good. And it’s FREE!
If you read only one book on design, read [The Non-Designer’s Design Book] (