As I talked about before, I started following the How to Learn JavaScript course from JavaScript Is Sexy. While I think it’s probably a great course, I am also starting to think it might not be for me – at least not at this point.
As per his recommendation, since I’m a newbie I am reading from the book JavaScript: The Definitive Guide
I learned years ago (thank you high school) that I don’t learn well from books unless it is a topic I’m really passionate about. It’s one reason I never got a university degree. Well, I’m running into that problem again. It’s ironic really, since I read more than anyone else I’ve ever met in my life.
Rather than continuing to beat my head against a wall and finishing the reading assignment through brute force with little/no absorption, I decided to look around to see if there were some other options.
I started on Amazon. I thought maybe I could find I “JavaScript for Dummies” type book that might be a little fun and interesting to read. There seemed to be a few options. I looked around the torrent sites a bit to see if I could snag a copy there (I know, bad me) but no joy. However, searching for the title and author of one book led me to a paid JavaScript course by that author and reading the reviews of that brought me to something even better: a FREE course! 🙂
The Beginners JavaScript tutorials look like exactly what I need. I’ve watched the first couple and so far I’m really liking them. They’re quick (just a few minutes each), they have code to test, the guy is funny and engaging, and I’m not staring at the pages of a book.
The course says it’s just a beginners series, so it might not get me as far as I need to go in order to get a job writing JS, but I’m hoping it’ll impart enough knowledge that I can go back to the book reading and actually understand what the author is writing about. It’ll still be deadly dull but at least then I might understand something before I fall asleep. 🙂 He also has a jQuery course with 200 videos in it so maybe he will take me to an advanced level.
Bucky Roberts, the guy behind the videos, seems to have created just a TON of well received videos so I suspect I’ll be spending a lot of time on this site. For those who don’t do well with just reading for learning but require something more interactive, this might be a great solution for you and he offers a wide variety of courses on dozens of subjects. They’d also be good for someone with limited time as each video seems to only be a few minutes long so you could just watch one here and there as you have time and still keep learning.
After completing web fundamentals, I started the PHP course in CodeCademy. I found I was struggling with it a bit and it wasn’t really gearing me up for my target job so I decided to switch to JavaScript which is highly in demand these days.
I started with the Web Fundamentals because I figured it would give me a good base to build from. It focused primarily on HTML and CSS, both of which I have some familiarity with from years of tweaking my sites. I was surprised by how much of the HTML I knew but I still learned a lot and the CSS was almost all new.
When I first started thinking about learning to code, the friend who suggested it to me sent me a link to a coding “bootcamp”. It was a 12-week immersion course guaranteed to take me from coding zero to coding hero in, well, 12 weeks. That sounds great right? Yep! Until I looked at the price tag! $11,500?! Yeah, if I had that kind of money laying around I wouldn’t be worrying.
Learning to Code 