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Stu Dus
Courses Plus Student 1,550 PointsFeeling lost in learning
I successfully finished an entire track and I had such a great feeling when I saw everything working great on my computer, as shown in the videos, but now I am lost as to what's next... now I have the feeling that I did not learn much and that I am not able to repeat any of the lessons I watched, alone!
Stu Dus
Courses Plus Student 1,550 PointsThanks, Steve. I really appreciate the time you took to write this helpful post.
6 Answers
Stephen O'Connor
22,291 PointsWhat track did you do? What are you on here to learn? Front-end development? Back-end development? IOS/Android programming?
If we know what you are looking to achieve from being on here then we can point you in the right direction.
Stu Dus
Courses Plus Student 1,550 PointsStephen, I finished the iOS track and I was happy to see all my apps running, but I am not able to remember much of what I did. What would be considered a next logical step here?
Stephen O'Connor
22,291 PointsHmm, maybe I am not the best person to ask as I have not done any IOS stuff, nor am I going to, I am much more interested in front-end development. Maybe someone else on here can point you in the right direction.
Good luck.
Ricardo Hill-Henry
38,442 PointsWhat has helped me greatly is taking notes while watching the videos. No matter what course, I try to follow along, as well as take as many notes as I can for later reference. Also, don't forget that you can always re-watch content to get a better grasp; that's the beauty of learning over the internet.
Stu Dus
Courses Plus Student 1,550 PointsThanks, Ricardo. I'll start over then and take notes this time, but is anyone else doing different? Is this the right way to learn, just watch the videos, type the code and you should know that stuff at the end?
Ricardo Hill-Henry
38,442 PointsFor me, it's small practice and notes. In all honesty, it's not about retaining everything. It's mostly about learning the language, and being able to do things in it. For example. we know English, but neither of us could know every word in the English vocabulary. However, with a basic understanding of creating a sentence, we may be able to look in a dictionary, find a word, and use correctly. But, to really learn that word, we have to constantly use it; which is why our teachers give us so many vocab quizzes when we're younger.
Also, try reading some books to reinforce what you've watched. Think of it in a college sense. You go to your lecture, but if you really want to grasp the content, you have to pick up the textbook. As you get more comfortable developing, you may be able to remember common methods and such, but the documentation will always be needed. However, with iOS, the methods are very long, and the class names are so similar so referencing the documentation is a must.
Also, if you've saved the projects on your computer, you could always use those to refresh your memory.
Stu Dus
Courses Plus Student 1,550 Pointsthat helps. thanks
Nick Ng
17,889 PointsI had a similar experience with Front-end Development track whereas I started it, paused for a while, and forgot what I had learned.
I'm making a second go and in order not to forget again, I started a private blog (I'm using Tumblr) to take notes and document my learning process. So during downtime, I read these notes again on my phone to refresh my memory.
Also, it helps me a lot if I share what I learned with an interested friend or family. If I can't explain it clearly, I haven't understood it enough.
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,243 PointsHi Nick.
I'm very interested to hear more about what you do with this tumblr blog. I've just written a similar blog for Wordpress but is a little more involved and is public.
Is tumblr a different thing?
Stu Dus
Courses Plus Student 1,550 PointsNick, great idea with writing everything in a blog.
Nick Ng
17,889 PointsJonathan, my tumblr blog isn't anything fancy. Just to jot down notes in mostly bullet points format.
I chose Tumblr over WP because it has a more simple user interface to work on and quick to post. However, it doesn't handle a sample/snippet of code well in a post as WP. And that's something I might regret later on. :)
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,243 PointsHi Nick,
It sounds like it's not too dissimilar to what I do in Evernote then. I jot down as many notes as I think are relevant including Quiz points I think might be useful.
Might look at Timblr anyway just to check it out :)
Philip Cox
14,818 PointsCoding will not come from one run through of a tutorial I'm afraid. It takes lots of time and lots of repeat, repeat your code. One saying is 10'000 hours of code to become a good programmer. The best thing you can do is crack into another course, and another course, it will come eventually. Reading a good book on the subject or articles can really help to ingrain the information.
Stu Dus
Courses Plus Student 1,550 Points10k hours is roughly 5 years of coding 40 hrs/week. not that bad :-)
Nigel Ryan
8,071 PointsMy feeling is that while it helps to remember everything you can do a lot by understanding the basic principles, knowing what tools are available to you, and knowing where to find them when you need them. I've found these courses great for those things. Of course the tools you use most frequently will be the ones you remember, no need to retain everything.
Steve Smith
12,955 PointsSteve Smith
12,955 PointsBecoming proficient at programming is a multi-faceted animal; you need to understand the tools, you need to understand the language, you need to understand how to find things in the documentation and online, and you need to understand how to translate a real world use-case into a programmatic solution.
This doesn't all happen in one course.
Take as many different courses as you can, if you're in the iOS track now, try some other object oriented programming courses if you haven't got experience with object oriented concepts. Go through all the iOS course material that's offered, and download the finished project code from each, so you've got a library of working project code you can refer back to.
Take the database track and ground yourself in database theory, as that's going to be incredibly valuable when you start diving into CoreData.
Expose yourself to as much iOS as possible, and that includes the UI/UX/App design material, and both Objective C and Swift. Once you've soaked up everything you can, you'll find that Xcode is comfortable and you know where everything is, you'll have spend time approaching user requirements and translating them into programmatic solutions, and you'll have seen enough code to know what you likely want to accomplish in different parts of an app, roughly how to go about doing it, and where you've seen or used that code before.
Once you're at that point, design a simple app yourself combining a bunch of elements from apps you've build in the demos, maybe go through the entire app specification process that you'll learn in the UI/UX track, then code up your app, leaning on the code you've accumulated through all the lessons as needed to remind you how to do things.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Build a simple app, make it work and then iterate to add more complex functionality. Make it something you're interested in building as you'll be more motivated to build and enhance it, and that will make the incremental knowledge sticky.
Before you know it, you'll be coding comfortably, and you'll be able to continually push out the limits of your knowledge as you go.