teraspora

Some ideas for coding students learning Front-end Development

  1. Experiment all the time with little web pages to explore one concept, just on your local machine. Open it in Chrome. Change something. Refresh the page. See the effect.

  2. Don't always copy and paste code: Type it out! Memory of the syntax will go into your fingers, like learning a musical instrument.

  3. Always be looking for a range of sources of information about what you are learning. You will discover which sites help you most.

  4. Use a range of learning media - video tutorials, text tutorials, official documentation, podcasts...

  5. Keep your experiments organised with a clear and well-named folder structure.

  6. Read code constantly, so you absorb an understanding of good and bad formatting, good and bad coding style, comments etc..

  7. Learn by practice how to find out answers yourself before asking someone. Most of your issues will have been encountered, asked about, and solved before. Think carefully about what is the essence of the matter, and distil it into a few salient keywords you can feed to Google.

  8. Make sure you learn the basics of Git and Github. That's going to be really important as you progress in the complexity.

  9. Get comfortable with the command line. Ditto re importance.

  10. Accuracy will save you time and stress.

  11. Assume that case (UPPERCASE or lowercase) is always important. Even in cases where it is not critical, there will be a convention. Stick with it.

  12. Get comfortable with reading stack traces - the screenfuls of messages that are printed when something doesn't work, showing the functions called. It takes practice to be able to hone in on the important lines.

  13. Get used to the Chrome Developer Tools. This takes time, as they have become quite complex, with a plethora of functionality. But as you get to know them they will become more and more useful to you, so just play with them at first, read some guides and experiment.

  14. Take breaks. Try not to stress out when you haven't understood something. Breathe. Sleep on it. Get away from the screen and go for a walk.

                        ## Enjoy the journey!