What I’ve Learned so Far

I strongly advise anybody completely new to html/css/javascript to get started immediately on Codecademy.

I am already pretty familiar with HTML/CSS. There’s a lot more I should learn and will along the way, but my focus will always be javascript. As for Javascript, I have copied and pasted code here and there for various wordpress sites but never had any idea what was going on. So eventually I started the codecademy Javascript course. It took me a good 4 tries before I could actually go through with it from beginning to end and when I did, I completed the course in about a week during a trip to Norway:

At the end of the course I found that I could build approximately nothing. I wanted to make a to do list app but I had no idea if I needed to declare my variables in a Gregorian chant at St.Paul’s or in notepad. I didn’t know what variables to declare, and what functions to create, how many, and what they would do. I didn’t want to make a to-do list through a series of window prompts which was pretty much all I learned on codecademy. I wanted to create a form that took a user input and displayed them below on when the user hit enter, or clicked a button.

So I decided to being looking at Youtube tutorials. I started checking out Udemy courses and signed up for a few. That’s when I started to recognize the value of Codecademy. I had checked these things out before, but had no idea what they were talking about. Suddenly, I could follow what they were saying and doing. Codecademy made it relatively easy and painless to learn the vocabulary of javascript, and I was able to wrap my head around just enough so that I could really understand the logic behind what I was watching. This made it possible for me to follow along and experiment a bit while learning. This was invaluable.