Having a hard time with this track, any books recommendations for beginners? Thx!

You're right -- Andrew's not a bad instructor and he's definitely an extremely skilled developer, but I've found that his jQuery course makes it seem so much more complicated than it actually is. Honestly, the best place to start is probably at the official jQuery Learning Center. After you get a solid grasp of it, you can use the Treehouse course to help fill in the gaps.

And I definitely echo nicholas maddren's sentiment above. Think of something you want to do on a website, and try using jQuery to do it. That's the fastest way to learn.

The above suggestions are great. Google and Stack Overflow were my saviors when I was building my first site using JavaScript and JQuery.

However, the only problem I had with learning through Google and Stack is that you don't really learn coding "principles" per se. As in, what is the best way to structure my code so that it is the most readable and operates the fastest? How does this certain solution affect the rest of my code and interact with it?

Google and Stack will give you solutions for your specific problems, but it won't teach you big picture thinking. For example, "Will someone else be able to read my code?". Also, say you need to repeat a line of code that Stack gives you over and over for problems on different pages. There's probably a more efficient way of learning to write that code or implementing it, but Google and Stack won't teach that.

I eventually got my first site to work and run, but the code looks so messy and repeats itself so often -- I feel like it is held together by duct tape. Now that I've gotten some experience under my belt, I realize I need to learn more coding basics and create a foundation that I can build on. That's where Treehouse is helpful.

But if you do also want to look at books for information, one book I've found to be very helpful so far is JavaScript and JQuery by Jon Duckett.

The book is meant for designers, so the design is nice and it doesn't read like a textbook. It's much friendlier. Hope this helps :).

Sun-Li Beatteay Ben Schroeder nicholas maddren Thx everyone for the help :). I will definitely come back to this track once I will have a better understanding of what JQuery does. In the meantime I bought myself Jon Duckett's book and I'm planning on trying out on my own (almost) all the examples on the JQuery website. In the meantime, maybe I'll try to build my Illustration portfolio and actually succeed. Thx again and happy coding :).

I am in the same boat. This course is all project-based. It's like diving into each project without knowing the basic tools. I took those Javascript courses before coming here, but Jquery seems like a whole different beast. It is like being given a problem of finding the area under a curve in calculus without knowing integration. I find myself Googling a lot and turning to different tutorial sources like books, Youtube and Codedacademy. I think this course is much more than your Jquery basics. This is definitely not a beginner's course. Perhaps, doing a video series on the essential topics of Jquery would be helpful (e.g. what do front-end developers run into the most? what are the essential tools?) At least a few videos on the basic tools like event handlers and their effects combined with some mini-projects, like those two JavaScript courses taught by David McFarland (where the videos build up to a mini-project in each lesson and I was able to piece together the tools needed to solve the problems).