New jQuery Basics: Chalkers FTW!

I just wanted to say, that coincidence allowed me a relatively unique perspective: I completed the older "Build an Interactive Website" jQuery course by Mr. Chalkley just days before they swapped it out of my current track (WordPress Development) with the new course: jQuery Basics.

At first, I was a little annoyed to see that I had to take the course "all over again." But I shut my mouth and buckled down, because deep down, I knew that I wasn't entirely happy with the former course at this stage in my education (I had just been complaining to my wife about it, lol) and it might be worth seeing if I got more out of the newer course.

Well, I did.

As I told my wife, I felt that the initial course made a leap analogous to:

• A. Learn to Tie Your Shoes.
• B. Leap the Washington Monument.

Okay, hyperbole aside, I've never been a real programmer, but I had a modicum of aptitude for it back in the days before Object Oriented systems took over. I learned structured programming in Pascal and C, and so, I still struggle with the execution of the OO way. Thanks to a little study, I understand the concepts, but not so much the application. It is with the OO aspects of the syntax that I had problems in the Build an Interactive Website course. I felt the quizzes asked me to make challenging but reasonable leaps of logic in applying a particular video's lesson, but assumed too much about my understanding of the OO aspects of JavaScript.

I almost never need help on quizzes or code challenges, but I frequently found myself poking around the forum for answers to the quizzes in that older course. And since so many other people apparently had the same issues, I didn't need to start any new threads. I consistently found someone else's question matched my own.

The bottom line is that my limited abilities with method/attribute/property syntax in JavaScript were getting in the way of me learning jQuery.

jQuery Basics is a totally different story. Each chapter builds upon the previous chapter steadily, and the quizzes are now directly related to the videos they follow. Honestly, I might even say they're a tad too easy, but I can also say that I finished the course with a good fundamental understanding of jQuery, and am eager to dig deeper on my own now.

And I'm guessing that's the whole idea.

So thank you to Chalkers and Treehouse for continuing to make the art and science of development and design accessible to the rest of us.

(And to be fair to Mr. Chalkley, I think the design of the first course was reasonably in line with what one might expect from a college course with regard to using quizzes to demonstrate a deeper understanding. But that kind of understanding really requires the kind of time and homework commitments inherent to that kind of educational model. Perhaps the online, self-directed style of education lends itself better to stressing exposure, leaving it up to me to dig deeper later if I so choose. I wonder...)

(Edit: just a little grammar fixeroni.)

Edit 2.0: It just occurred to me that I completely omitted an important point: that much of the first course: Build an Interactive Website, uses the "Smells Like Bakin'" website project. This may have been more helpful when more lessons were based on it, but as it's already been phased out of other areas, my lack of familiarity with the project only added to the general disorientation I experienced trying to tackle jQuery.

Looking forward to more, Mr. C!