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Mikey rizkalla
5,525 PointsIs using a lot of plugins good practice?
I've been doing a few follow along projects on skillshare and noticed that they use alot of plugins like responsive grid plugins and bootsrap plugins. It's pretty much copy and paste a ton of code instead of writing it myself. Is this bad for someone who is learning to code or is it just common practice to use these plugins?
3 Answers
Kevin Fitzhenry
30,096 PointsThese sort of plugins are commonly used. However, if you are just learning HTML and CSS, I would strongly encourage not copy and pasting code. You should type things out as much as possible, you gain a much better understanding of what each element is doing. Also, it will give you better understanding of what some of these frameworks and plugins are doing under the hood. The best thing you can do to learn is to experiment and build, it's okay to fail and it's okay if what you make isn't pretty and/or doesn't work. If you are following a project on Skillshare and you copy and paste code, go into the code and tweak things and change bits of code, refresh your browser and see what happened. Also, use your browsers' development tools to explore different elements. Most importantly, keep building!
Henrik Hansen
23,176 PointsPlugins/framworks is a great timesaver. But many argues you should do "pure" css/javascript/whatever. I would argue that if you really want to learn, you should avoid framworks. Everything the do can be done by yourself, and often it is not really that hard. You will learn so many things by this.
But there are some great benefits with 'em. First there is the "support all browsers that was ever invented", this is where jQuery (among others) will really shine, and instead of researching what functions to use in IE and what to use in Chrome, you can just do the stuff you were supposed to do. Bootstrap and others gives you the same benefits with the styling, also you will have lots of css already written that you probably would have written by yourself anyways if you were starting from scratch.
So for learning, I really recommend that you do not use any frameworks. Other than that it is really a question of what you are doing. Is it really worth adding the extra kbytes of jQuery? How much will it hurt performance of your application? Or perhaps it will even have better performance? Find the balance! It is probably more common to use some of those, than it is to never use them. I even think most CMS uses jQuery and Bootstrap (or something else) as default.
Mikey rizkalla
5,525 Pointsawesome, thanks guys! I'll definitely try to do it all on my own without the plugins.