Good practices / Bad habits - Trehouse training

The example you've given is kinda unrelated to your concern. The videos are series so chances are, the following video will talk about the next part of what Nick introduced.

As for your concern, the videos are made by experts. These guys are the guys that we aspire to be half as good as. I've done a lot of learning here and I'm yet to try to implement something I've learnt and found it to be wrong or a bad practice. Everything that Treehouse teaches will pass W3C validation which is a pretty good indicator it's correct.

However, learning is about understanding a subject. Once you've learnt something, then it's up to you to build upon it and develop your own understanding to suit how you work best.

First, to say you're never going to see a mistake when learning coding is ridiculous. We are humans, we make mistakes.

Second, you have to be careful to distiguish between learning bad practices, and how fast the web moves. For instance, today we use floats and percentages to build fluid layouts. Tomorrow we will be using flexbox's to accomplish this task. When we start using flexbox for production, you're going to look back and say what you learned (floated layouts) is now bad practice. It'll be the old and "hacky" way to do something, but it's what you learned.

Real world example. Before we used floats for layouts, tables were used. Nobody uses (or should use) tables for layouts. Soon the same will be said about floats.

You should also be taking in your learning sources from more than just treehouse. There is CodeSchool ($25 monthly), Code Academy (free), Learn Street (free), great podcasts like CSS Tricks screencasts (older videos show how fast the web moves, some old stuff in there), StopTalk, and so many great blogs.

Write your code, validate it, rinse and repeat. If you're concerned about the level of quality here, check out other sources and compare.

There are more than one way to skin a cat with code. Some ways are better than others, but they get the same net result. The first step to being kinda good at something is to really suck at it first.

I've always enjoyed this because it's too true. Seems to be a daily problem for more than just me. You're a problem solver, every day you code.

There's an old Russian proverb that translates roughly as "trust, but verify." Ronald Reagan used it a lot to describe the American relationship with the Soviet Union, but I think it's also a really important idea when you're learning anything from an educational authority (whether that's someone at Treehouse, a college professor, a book, or a tutorial on the internet).

Trust - If you've come to recognize someone/something as an educational authority, it's because they've done something to earn your trust. They've demonstrated their skill or knowledge in the area you want to learn about, and are willing to put effort into trying to share that information with you. They want you to learn what they have to teach, and so it would be wise to trust that they're giving you solid information at the proper point in your learning experience.

But verify - Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody. The teachers at Treehouse put a lot of effort into making their lesson plans as concise and clear as possible. The video team spends a lot of time turning the raw footage and screencasts into the realization of that lesson plan. We have a process in place for reviewing the quality of the finished product before it goes out to students. But none of those steps are infallible and mistakes and errors are going to make it through into the final product.

So you should trust that we're doing the best we can to provide an awesome and accurate learning experience for you, but you also shouldn't be scared to double-check our work and think that we might be wrong if some information we're presenting doesn't make sense. Trust that we're doing everything we can to give you an awesome learning experience, but verify anything that doesn't seem right :)

If you ever wonder about something you read/heard somewhere about HTML/CSS here are few sources to cross reference it with.

• HTML Dog
• Beginner's Guide to HTML & CSS
• Sitepoint Reference
• devdocs.io