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Connor Hamilton
5,023 PointsDo Experienced developers/Treehouse Teachers know all off by heart?
Hello, i am making my way through the Front End Developer track currently. I am a graphic designer looking to merge with coding and have gotten to the end of the CSS section.
Which details transformations and animations then responsive designs and media queries.
Will i be expected to know all of this off by heart? Do the Teachers know? Or do experienced developers still look certain things up on the internet.
For example, with transformations and animations i am sure its a bit tough to totally remember all of the -web kit-animation properties along with the rotate axis let alone the rest.
I feel like its not sinking in and am going back to videos alot and even looking on W3C at the most simple stuff at times when coding, such as adding a image in html compared to adding a image as a background in my div in css.
Am i alone here?
2 Answers
Dave McFarland
Treehouse TeacherNo, you don't have to memorize every HTML tag or CSS property. Professional developers, myself included, still have to look up things frequently. CSS gradients, for example, have a detailed syntax that I haven't memorized. Google is every developer's friend, and answers are just a search away.
What's most important it to know what's POSSIBLE. If you know that you CAN add a gradient to the background of an element, or that it's possible to make a <div> fade out of viewing using CSS transitions, you'll know what you can and can't do. When going through the courses try to remember what's possible -- not necessarily all the details of HOW to do something.
However, it doesn't hurt to memorize either. The more you know and the less you need to search for answers, the faster and more productive you'll be. The best way to make the lessons at Treehouse stick is to just BUILD STUFF: making web sites is the best way for you to really learn all the details of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Once you've written your 50th web animation, you'll probably remember most if not all the syntax for the CSS animation property.
Andrew Molloy
37,259 PointsYou're not alone. There's a lot that comes with experience in terms of being able to remember stuff off by heart but it's by no means extensive. Everyone uses tools, documentation and reuse of libraries and snippets they've previously written or available from others. I'm not a professional web developer but I'm a professional simulation developer and even switching between two languages (e.g. c# and php) requires a bit of a warm up each time (even going back to what should be very easy functions just as a reminder), and a lot of referencing to official docs and even back to my own code in how I did things previously. It just comes with the territory. And everyone just tries to make their own lives easier, for example using Sass to make CSS easier etc.
It's a gradual learning curve that slowly sinks in and you find you naturally need to reference things less and less but I'd say it's a long way from remembering off by heart and there's really no need to. Keep sticking at it, the key is practice and experimentation and as you learn more you'll find tools and techniques that mean you don't HAVE to remember a lot of stuff anyway, the main thing is knowing how it works and what you're trying to achieve.