Hazzah!
As we're going through new material I've started to rely heavily on our reading as a resource. My objective throughout the day isn't to be able to build code from scratch by myself - it's to know what resources to use to do it. Half of the battle is knowing what tools you need and the other is how to implement it. If I can figure it out using the reading from the night before I know I'm doing something right.
Some of the students are reaching the part of overwhelmed that I hit my first day. They had previous background in HTML and CSS so they breezed through the first three weeks and now feel stuck. It sounds condescending to recommend the night's reading to them but that's how I've been getting through the whole time. Take, for example, XMLHTTPRequests. After the reading and the lesson I learned they facilitate the process of my code retrieving data from another 'location' on the web. Knowing when I want to use an XMLHTTPRequest and how to write one (and where) is different. So I used my resources, checked Newline, and found exactly what I was looking for. I implemented it in my code. It didn't quite work so I double checked my variable names and checked again. Not quite. Finally, looked through to make sure everything was nested properly and hello data!
The review in the morning really set me on track. One of my instructors thoroughly went over the difference between anonymous functions and named functions, our name for the example function being 'huzzah!' which I found appropriate given every time our code worked we would see printed to the screen 'huzzah!'. Though being pretty self explanatory, the syntax of an anonymous function and a named fucntion is different enough to throw me for a loop every time. Especially when attempting to make some of these requests I needed to double check where my paranthesis were going. I had to see the difference between calling a function and passing a function before I could really complete my work. All of these tips and tricks are what compile together to be coding. Learning to code really is like learning another language. Immersion is key and even if you spend half of the day looking through the translation dictionary you'll pick up way more trying something and getting wrong!
Some of the students are reaching the part of overwhelmed that I hit my first day. They had previous background in HTML and CSS so they breezed through the first three weeks and now feel stuck. It sounds condescending to recommend the night's reading to them but that's how I've been getting through the whole time. Take, for example, XMLHTTPRequests. After the reading and the lesson I learned they facilitate the process of my code retrieving data from another 'location' on the web. Knowing when I want to use an XMLHTTPRequest and how to write one (and where) is different. So I used my resources, checked Newline, and found exactly what I was looking for. I implemented it in my code. It didn't quite work so I double checked my variable names and checked again. Not quite. Finally, looked through to make sure everything was nested properly and hello data!
The review in the morning really set me on track. One of my instructors thoroughly went over the difference between anonymous functions and named functions, our name for the example function being 'huzzah!' which I found appropriate given every time our code worked we would see printed to the screen 'huzzah!'. Though being pretty self explanatory, the syntax of an anonymous function and a named fucntion is different enough to throw me for a loop every time. Especially when attempting to make some of these requests I needed to double check where my paranthesis were going. I had to see the difference between calling a function and passing a function before I could really complete my work. All of these tips and tricks are what compile together to be coding. Learning to code really is like learning another language. Immersion is key and even if you spend half of the day looking through the translation dictionary you'll pick up way more trying something and getting wrong!
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