Feeling overwhelmed and confused

Have never related so much to a post before, I am really struggling with this Object-oriented javascript part of the course. I've arrived at this project and have absolutely no idea where to start. Not sure if its Andrews way of teaching and the way they've set out this part of the course or I've simply jumped the gun and need more practice. Maybe a bit of both.

Looking forward to future responses to this one :/

Also, since Andrew Chalkey has a really strong accent, that makes his courses even harder to understand!

99% of the time you won't ever use this confusing syntax. It's all obsolete because of ES2015 http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/get-started-ecmascript-6

https://teamtreehouse.com/library/introducing-es2015 Arcane prototypal inheritence... GONE (well... hidden) and replaced with 'class' and 'extends'. I don't even have to tell you what those are and you can tell that class is an object and extends... extends that class/object. Makes this whole thing way easier. Just wait till you play with functional programming libraries like Ramda or Mori and learn that "for loops" never have to be used... maybe they should never be used actually (performance and integrity reasons). I'm telling you this because I'm not stressing out at all about actually having to write code in the way shown here. It's good to know, but if you look up JS jobs, ALL of them require you to know Node, JQuery, React, maybe a framework like Angular, so in essence you won't be spending most of your time writing vanilla JS. And if you ever forget... just get a refresher from some treehouse courses :-)

Feeling the EXACT same way. I get these OOP concepts are some of the more difficult to understand, but in this case it feels like the training wheels came off way too soon. It's hard not to get frustrated by this and feel like this code challenge is some kind of trial by fire. But my response is... who cares? It's perfectly OK to find another guide to learn these concepts (and that's what I'll be doing). I feel like I've grasped a broad overview of how this stuff works from Andrew's course, but not quite enough to then come up with the solution on my own or remember how all the moving parts work together. I also don't feel particularly inspired by this particular project. I'd rather figure out a way to use these ideas to make something relevant to my interests.

This has happened to me with other topics on TT... I barely understood anything the first run through, then worked independently, sought out other resources, and then finally revisited the treehouse course to help solidify the ideas. Everybody learns differently, rather than watching the same treehouse video over and over I'd prefer to seek out other examples and tutorials to fill in the gaps.

As in with most programming learning paths, we hit a point of frustration, this is normal, this is actually a good sign, a sign that you are trying to really understand what it is going on, what makes the wheels move as they say. I find myself in this position from time to time, in my experience, a couple of things help me step over the hump: simply keep going for a little longer, some times learning the next step allows us to understand the previous topics better. If this does not work, take a break and try using the material in a hands-on project of your own, the key here is to try come up with a situation where you can use the material using the most basic implementation possible. I hope this helps, do not despair, some times all we need is to stop and breathe for a few minutes. Cheers.

Good thread guys--feeling a bit overwhelmed on this one as well.

For anybody who needs some guidance on their journey of struggling with JS. https://www.sitepoint.com/learning-javascript-9-common-mistakes/?utm_source=SitePoint&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Versioning

These are 9 problems that keep people back from learning JS. I definitely found this validating and helpful! I found my biggest problems were picking too big a project for me and for following along too often without understanding, rather than slowing down and just practice the small elements of what I learned. Hope it helps.

It was a relief to see that I wasn't the only one struggling with this. There are a lot of great suggestions and links here and they're helping a lot. What's helping the most though, is that I was able to remove the added pressure I gave myself by thinking I was dumb, and focus on the advice, links, tips and resources provided above, after reading this thread.

So a huge thanks guys.

ps. I also thought that Andrew Chalkley style of teaching wasn't very good, but after reading this thread I have to change that thinking because of all the resources and suggestions, and tips that I was able to have access to as a result of his teaching. So kudos.

I'm right there with you in the novice pits. Game Dev?!?! That's amazing! I've only been learning for 5 weeks now, but I love all this stuff.

Couldn't agree more with everything you said. I've nearly finished the "Front-end Web Development Course" and as soon as I have I plan on jumping into the "Javascript Basics" course.

I need to start trying to make some own little projects of my own, wasn't really sure where to start though so I will check out the link (Thank you!) I do try and give myself plenty of breaks and rewards as I know I am someone who can potentially become unmotivated and distracted easily. I completely related to 5.) Following and doing the course is just a start, once you start developing your own sites and apps is when you really learn.

After reading through my "Javascript and Jquery" book by "Jon Duckett" last night i managed to get a MUCH better understanding of OOP, I think just explaining it differently helped me.

Still plenty of work and practice to be done to ensure i do understand it though! =D and may the force be with you, good luck and thanks!

Great to hear you're sticking with it! I've been chugging along with JS and Python and I probably research trends in programming every day. I will say this... the future looks like a hybrid of OOP and Functional Programming. Over time JS has become more and more like a classic OOP, meanwhile the 'hot' trend in OOP is to absorb more Functional Programming ideas. I've done a bunch of reading on the subject and I can see why treehouse offers a course on Scala. I was tempted to try Haskell, and I tried the Scala vids, BUT the best one I've seen so far is Ramda JS. Before you fall down that rabbit hole, JavaScript does have NATIVE CODE for three of the most used FP methods of map, filter, and reduce. This is not some extra library, it's native. So just like the ES2015 stuff, you can use it and not ever have to worry about going back to code in the old way. (if you need to transpile it or something, just run your code through Babel). I highly suggest learning these and using them everywhere you can:

https://hackernoon.com/understanding-map-filter-and-reduce-in-javascript-5df1c7eee464

That hackernoon article shows some of it. from what i've seen it's better at manipulating large data sets (arrays, databases, key/value pairs, etc). because when you work in OOP you primarily focus on 'how' you will do things. most of the time that's in the form of some kind of 'for loop' ... i'm gonna go very abstract here cuz i'm not familiar with the code/syntax... basically here's the diff as I understand it. Here might be an example of a program to send a promo message to some customers in a database. The OOP method

1. create a variable 'message' that holds a string
2. create a variable 'users' that holds an array
3. create a method sendMessage() for sending the message to the users. it will take an array of users and a string as it's arguments.
4. create a "for loop" that iterates over a large database of customers and returns who bought something in the last 30 days
5. now create a loop that iterates over that result and gets returns users living in any of 5 cities
6. now create a loop over the result that finds users that are interested in certain hobbies
7. now take the result and use the ".length" of the list to create a string variable to that reads something like "you are one of [400/500/1000? whatever the length of the list is] to get a special pre-order offer!"
8. assign that string to the message variable
9. assign the results of steps 4-6 to the variable 'users' you created earlier
10. call the sendMessage() function and pass it the arguments of message and users

in OOP

1. find(all users (whoBoughtThingsInTheLast30days (livingInTheseCities (whoAreInterestedInTheseHobbies(inCustDataBase)))
2. forEachUserFound(send("Congratulations! you are one of %{theTotalNumberofResultsFound} selected to get a special pre-order offer!))

in general, functional programming focuses on what you want to do instead of how you want to do it, it's easier to read, there's less guarding/error handling you have to write into the code, and it tends to run faster than OOP solutions. That's not to say that OOP is useless. OOP I think is fantastic for modeling representations of what you want to achieve, but then if you want to manipulate large data, then use FP for that and then pass on the results to your model to display it. So far the best vid I've seen for it is on pluralsight.com I did their trial and watched some vids on golang and one series on "JavaScript Hardcore Functional Programming". I'll probably end up subscribing there too, but I like treehouse more. It's just that TH doesn't have much on Go or Functional programming, and most of the dev blogs i've been reading keep saying that you need to learn some kind of FP. If you are interested in building a website for your own purposes, then I would say, don't bother. I want to get a $$$ job doing full-stack work with maybe more of a focus on the backend.