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Jeremiah Allen
14,627 PointsNeed advice planning my course of study
Sorry for the long post, but I really need advice.
I've been learning through treehouse, youtube, and Jon Duckett's two popular books. A while ago I got hung up on the jQuery portion of the Front-End track and feel like I've been a bit lost in my progress. I saw a suggestion to take the edX cs50 course, and so I started that as well. Now, I'm really lost. It has me starting with the C language, and so I looked around to find out if it was really what I should be doing. Subsequently, I've read a hundred times that Javascript was not a good first language to learn for reasons that are over my head at this point. With so many topics that I don't understand (angular, node, json, ajax, etc.) that I know I will have to learn be competent, as well as cs50 using C (which they suggest you purchase two books for) I feel like I should be investing my resources in javascript or ruby or anything other than C for a web job. Was I led astray? Should I be doing cs50 or learning elsewhere? Knowing C sounds great, but I'm trying to change careers in the shortest time possible and don't know if this is the path I should take.
Treehouse helped me get started quickly but I'm losing sight of the bigger picture and need some sound advice to stay on course with what I should be doing. Thanks to anyone who took the time to read this.
1 Answer
Michael Hulet
47,913 PointsMy first language was C. I taught it to myself when I was 8 years old. A lot will disagree with me, but I think C is an awesome first language, because it forces you to understand how a computer works, and build your own stuff that would be very common in other languages, which gives you a far better understanding of how those things work, though it is definitely a tough language. However, that makes it remarkably easy to pick up just about anything else afterwards. That being said, if you're looking for something really easy to catch on to that will take you very far, I would totally try Python. It's a dead-simple language that a whole lot of people use today, even for web development (using things like the Flask framework). That being said, if you're looking to be a frontender, the only languages that would be truly relevant are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, (and maybe a CSS preprocessor like Sass), which can all be learned from the Front-End Web Development and Web Design tracks