A bit confused by the DOM

Well, I will have to agree with you Andrew did go really fast in comparison to Dave. Although it was hard I did learn a lot from Andrew because I was obligated to make some research and review the videos if I was lost.

I will have to strongly disagree with Brendan JQuery is a really important skill in WebDevelopment and its required in almost every company. I you have questions regarding the exercises come to the forum or just search on the internet for some documentation on that particular thing you are stuck on.

Remember the job of a Programmer is to find solutions and to research.

Stick it out. To be honest, I really didn't get a lot of what Dave taught. There were some challenges that I simply could not do. Eventually, I tried a few other, non-Treehouse resources, came back and got through it. It was tough, though. There's no getting around that. Sometimes it's helpful to just take a break and learn something else for a while - then come back and try again. Now I've started working on Node.js, which is another course that Andrew teaches. His style is different than Dave's, but it's a helpful way to think through a problem. And, in the Node.js course, I feel like I understand JavaScript so much more than before, which is encouraging!

But remember that instead of feeling like Treehouse needs to teach you, it will be a far more important skill to learn how to teach yourself. Good luck!

Don't worry. With Andrew's style you need to use your intuition a bit more than Dave's, and it can surely be frustrating at first. Take some time to reach out to other sources to get a handle on some of the new ideas but make sure that you come back and write the code with him. One of the best things you can do is to really think about the logic of what you're making, and you could go even further to recreate the entire finished projects from scratch to make sure you really know how to do it.

Just to add an update to this post...

For some reason, about halfway through the course things kind of clicked for me. Sort of.

I realized that a lot of DOM manipulation with JS isn't really coding but more connecting things. You can reference a CSS class or an HTML element and then modify its value, or hide it, or something "programatic", but it's not as programatic as what we were doing in the JS basics course with creating math games and quizzes.

So, I suppose that's what front-end web development consists of for the DOM at least. Using a programming language to modify visual elements on the page via the DOM. Where-as a backend language, or doing AJAX/Node.js would be more like programming in the sense of if/else statements, conditions, etc.

I think that the bridge between teaching the basics of JS (programming concepts) and jQuery (DOM manipulation) was very subtle if not lost completely through instruction. So, thats what I was really struggling with because I went from "Let's do some coding!" with JS to "lets modify visual elements" with JS. Even though it should have been obvious to me, I really would like the segue during lessons to have noted this change in philosophy.

Maybe it had to do with the different training styles and philosophies of Dave and Andrew. Or, maybe the jQuery course didn't explain the ideology of the DOM well enough (the DOM was explained more in-depth in the course after jQuery though). Still, I think Andrew went too quickly, but he is a great instructor.

I agree with what others have said, that you should try other tutorials other places. Different methods work better for some people. I've done multiple beginner courses different places and it helps solidify my knowledge and some concepts become more clear from other teachers.

I also recommend that when you run into a problem, make an attempt and then post your code to the forum with that specific problem, then you can make incremental progress.

You also don't have to learn JQuery at all. There are many different languages and frameworks that accomplish the same thing.