Stop wasting time when you're learning to code! | Credits : Coder Coder

 

When you're learning to code do you ever feel like you're stuck learning the same thing over and over again? you might watch a tutorial video and by the end, you feel like you kind of get it but when the next day rolls around you've no clue how any of it works anymore so you have to go back and re-watch the tutorial unfortunately this pattern keeps repeating you might feel like none of this knowledge is actually sticking in your brain and it can get very frustrating to feel like you're not getting anywhere so in this video I'm going to cover some common pitfalls that might be tripping you up and causing you to waste time when you're learning to code. 

now as a disclaimer keep in mind that there  are no magical shortcuts that will transform you overnight into a coding expert I know, even  with good learning techniques it's still going to take time to go from a beginner developer to a  more advanced one alright let's get into the tips 

The first one is don't learn things randomly figure out a road map to follow if you're jumping around trying to learn git one day CSS custom  properties the next and javascript promises on the third you may be setting yourself up for a lot  of hardship instead of picking things at random to  learn look for a structured path that you can  follow one path

the main skills that you'll need to learn and the order to learn them you can also go through an online Bootcamp curriculum like FreeCodeCamp, Zero to Mastery, or Ania Kubów's 12-hour Bootcamp on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The benefit of following a pre-made path is that you'll know what you need to learn and when and as you go from one step to the next you'll be able to see your progress and feel like you're actually getting somewhere now as you're following your path you might be tempted to try to learn multiple things at the same time in order to get through everything more quickly but doing this may actually divide your attention and make it harder for that knowledge to stick. 

So Tip number two is don't try to learn everything all at once but focus on learning one thing at a time I recommend staying on one subject until you feel you have a decent grasp of the basics at least when you're starting out for example let's say you're learning HTML first once you feel like you know most of the common tags and can build a very basic HTML web page you can move on to learning CSS then in the future if you come across an HTML tag that you're not familiar with you can take some time to learn about that specific tag.

Tip number three be an active learner don't just passively consume content sitting  back and watching an instructor go through the  material without trying anything yourself is not  going to get you very far instead try to do some  combination of taking a new information and then  trying it yourself in real life for example I went through Wes Bos's CSS grid course back when I was  first learning about grid what I did was I would  watch the video and try to code along with was  through the lessons if I didn't fully understand something I would go back and watch it again and  after each lesson I would pause the course and try to build the lesson examples on my own without  looking back as much as possible this trying to  create what you've just learned without looking at  the source code is a great way to see how much you actually remember and it'll very quickly help  you identify the weak points in your knowledge  so you can then go back and fill it in after the  course was done I felt like I had a basic grasp  of CSS grid but I wouldn't consider myself an  expert by any definition and I think that's okay  because I could try to use grid when building  website layouts and if I ever got stuck on  anything I could refer back to the course or  other resources like Mozilla Developer Network learning new skills and coding is a combination  of learning the knowledge and putting it into practice.

Which brings me to Tip number four don't  just memorize stuff remember back in school when you were learning vocabulary words and history  dates you might have studied lists of facts and memorized them so that you could regurgitate  them for tests and quizzes now I'm not here to debate the pros and cons of rote memorization  however trying to learn html by just memorizing lists of all the html tags is not going to be very  effective coding is an applicable skill not just a collection of abstract facts obviously you do need  to be able to remember things in order to use them  but you're going to learn flexbox a lot faster  if you explore all the different properties by  playing around in a code pen for a day or two as  opposed to just memorizing the definition of flex  grow no web developer is going to know everything  off the top of their head I can attest to this  as someone who worked in the industry for a long  time and worked with other professional developers  we all used Google or DuckDuckGo if you care  about your privacy to look up stuff constantly in a way Stack Overflow, MDN, and CSS Tricks  become kind of like an extension of your brain the goal of all this is to be able to build  websites and if you need to look up stuff along the way that's perfectly fine everyone  does it

And that brings me to Tip number five build stuff I know everyone says this but it really is the best way to learn to code watching tutorials and going through courses is the beginning, not the end of learning web development at my first web dev job I would be given a  project like building a landing page with a button and getting it to submit to a database now since this was my job I had to build it I didn't really have a choice and oftentimes I'll be given a task that I had no idea how to do scary right the only solution was to jump right in and try my best I  would look stuff up and try things on my own and ask for help when I really was stuck even though the process of figuring this all out may have been very painful at times it was all worth it in the end. Thanks for reading this article make sure to comment down your thoughts and share these articles with your friends. So I will see you in the next Article until then keep Codding.