Intimidated by coding, anyone else like this?

I feel the same way. I have always wanted to be a web designer/developer and I love these classes. They are great! But when I go to do it on my own it's very daunting. I tend to have trouble finding my own mistakes in the codes, so when I try and do it by myself and cant figure it out it's very frustrating. I do pretty well on the quizzes and I think I do ok on the cade challenges but I feel like I ask for help a lot in finding those dumb little mistakes=/

Right on. Try meditation or exercise. Headspace is a cool app that does 10 minute guided meditation; follow that with some push ups, and your brain will ready to code.

It's all a matter of a leap of faith. What I'd suggest if you feel really intimidated is to just go back to the lessons and follow along coding with them. Just keep redoing the lessons until you feel comfortable and maybe even start coding by yourself by making changes to the page as you go. Really you won't learn it well until you go out and do it on your own and learn what breaks your page and what doesn't.

Melissa has a great idea.

Look at the pages/apps/scripts that you're coding along with the classes and tutorials. Is there something extra you want to try adding to them? Think of something just a tiny bit more than what they showed you in the class.

Save a copy of the page or script, or whole app, and try to add that little extra thing yourself. If your change breaks it, remove your change and try again. Or dig into some code where someone else was able to make it work and find out why it works. Or ask in a forum or on Stack Overflow for help (only after you've tried yourself though and have some code to show that you tried).

When I was at a technical college learning web stuff, I did a little tutoring. The students I tutored signed up on their own to have a tutor. This alone showed that they were willing to go outside of the textbook/tutorial in order to gain a deeper understanding of what was going on, and not just following the step-by-step instructions. They questioned the instructions. "Ok, yes, I see that the instruction says to do that... but why?? Why does it work like that?? Why doesn't it work like that??" Many other students in the classes were content with just following the instructions for the tutorial and handing in their assignment to 'get the grade'. Some even went so far as to outright plagiarize the work of the students that were being tutored!

My experience was similar to the students being tutored. I wanted more than just the step-by-step, because I knew not a single project or job I would get after training was going to come along with tutorial-like documentation. So, I built up confidence in the skills I already had and built on them outside of the classes.

My point is, you are definitely not alone in feeling like you need to work so hard at really gaining a deep understanding of coding and programming, and you are on the right track. Don't settle for only copy/paste, don't settle for only the step-by-step, use those as stepping stones to learning. Do keep questioning, do keep asking for support (like you've done here), do keep taking the next step, and do keep trying to build on your excellent design skills.

Keep it up!

Hi Stefani You are not alone. I felt the same while doing deepdive on css. Quick tip is whatever topic you are working on right now. Find a book/reading material like a blog on the same topic. In my case I found Oreilly Missing Manual book series on CSS and HTML. They are awesome! Treehouse videos contain a lot of info that is hard to digest in 8 -10 minutes. You should read the transcript below the video slowly to get better understanding. Beside watching the videos, I surf sites like CSS tricks on the addressed topics. Sometimes different examples of the same topic will help you in understanding the topics better

I am exactly the same. My brain seem to know the answers in quizzes but when it come to practical stuff, I go clue less! Once I have finished the web design adventure, I promised myself to retrace these steps with with some sort of exercise to hand. In a way, speed learning is a good thing so you know where your weak areas are for further learning.

I wrote a small blog article on this and made a short list of good websites to visit. Keep checking back as Im going to be updating the list. http://www.lukewilliamward.co.uk/index.php/initmidated-by-coding/

Yup, I'm the same. But lately I realised the only way to really learn where to start is to just start something, even if it's going to look bad. What I did was, I started off with an idea of a website and went back to any of the tutorials that were relevant for my website (eg. I coded the basic html and then went back to the tutorials on using grids in the first stage, and then later I went back to the tutorials relating to the slider). It worked out pretty well... after a few hours I finally had a website.

It wasn't a great website, but now I can spend time tweaking it. If you get stuck on something, just google and you might find an answer. After doing this process a few times, I think you'll have a good idea of what to do.

Now I'm just trying to figure out how to use all the frameworks and all that... that's the confusing part for me now :/