Cannot understand what is going on at all...Guidance?

Andrew's teaching style is killing me slowly..

Javascript is not an easy scripting language to learn but Andrew's style of teaching certainly doesn't help it at all!

James, I'm still trying to absorb some of this myself, so I can empathize.

My take on the OOP in JS is that they're trying to set a foundation. Ultimately, objects are an important data type (building block) that are common to many other programming languages. The other takeaway that I'm getting with this section is that they're trying to teach best practices without coming out and telling the students that.

I started my development career with WordPress and I see a lot of overlap in some areas. In WordPress, they use templates which allow you to be DRY. In other words, you can call a single header or footer files across 100's of web pages rather than repeating yourself and updating 100's of web pages when you want to make a single change. In essence, you can make that change once and 100's of web pages benefit. This is similar in a lot of respects.

Essentially, what they're tying to do is show you how to be more modular in how you programming. Ultimately, these techniques lead to faster programs since there's a "DRY" component throughout. It also allows the code to be more maintainable. Unfortunately for someone just starting out, it's pretty confusing since the person is still trying to wrap their mind around programming. Most students don't really care how maintainable their code works when they first start out. They'd rather have a program with 500 lines of code that they understand rather than a 30 line program that they don't understand.

My best advice is just trust the process. Even if it doesn't make sense now, you'll appreciate the method to the madness as you progress in your career. Skipping ahead and cutting corners often just lead you to coming back to foundation concepts like this and helps you to answer future why's and how's in programming.

OOP syntax in Javascript is not nearly as easy for me to grok as it is in other languages such as Python.

I don't think it's Andrew's style of teaching as much as it is the Javascript syntax.

The simplest way I can explain this is as follows: Andrew created a new constructor (or blueprint) called Media with some properties - duration, title, isPlaying etc. Think of Song as a type of Media object which inherits its properties (duration, title isPlaying). In other languages, it would be the equivalent of a sub class or child class that inherits from Media.

Song has its own unique property, called "artist", which does not exist in the Media object.

Next Andrew uses the call() method to chain constructors for an object. You are in effect, passing it the song object https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Function/call

Finally, Andrew uses the Object.prototype property to create the relationship between Media (base/parent class) and Song (its sub class) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Object/prototype

It's not Andrew's way of teaching guys, it is what he is teaching. It is a bit hard to grasp but once you do, it becomes mmm should I say easy??? This is my third time watching this series and only now does it make sense. IF this is the first time you are watching this, I recommend you watch it at least a couple more times and not just watch it but really understand what he is trying to achieve with the code.

I don't think it's anything to do with his teaching style. Andrew is always very clear. It's the content. This is intermediate level and it's bound to be tougher than the earlier Javascript courses. OOP isn't always an easy concept to grasp. It takes a bit of time. Stick with it.

Hi James,

The Mozilla documentation may be the single best resource for learning JS outside of actual courses like these.

In terms of "why OOP in JS", that's a long and opinionated discussion, best extolled by someone who's already written a book which is also a really great learning resource for JS, although not as formally structured (or complete) as the Mozilla documentation.

To answer your last question, you can skip whatever material you want, or stop taking this specific course altogether and move on to another one if you'd prefer. If you want to have the course marked as 'completed', however, you'll need to pass all quizzes and code challenges in it.

Hope that helps!

udemy instructer is better than this....