Should I be doing more?

I've been learning on Treehouse for about a year now, and I would suggest the 'practice by doing' approach. This stuff, at least for me, takes quite a bit of 'doing' and reinforcement to sink in. Personally, I'm using Treehouse, Code School, and a couple of YouTube channels to help me learn, and I'm reading a book called 'Eloquent JavaScript' to help beat it into my head.

However, nothing seems to help quite as much as applying these things on your own. Download a text editor (like Notepad ++, for example) and start putting into practice what you've learned. Come up with ideas and try to make them happen. For example, a friend has a photography business, so I have started working on a web site for his business.

As far as Workspaces, I always open Workspaces and try to follow along with the videos and code there to begin with. I'm at 8437 and still don't feel like I know enough. Seems like there's always more to learn.

Hope that helps, and good luck with your coding! :)

Hey Jonathan,

Your feelings are very common among individuals learning how to code. I feel them every day, too! Learning to code is like any other skills- repetition, practice, perseverance, and an attitude of "I can and will learn this" is critical. We learn how to code simply by coding, and like James said, he likes to surround himself with a variety of learning methods.

This is also how I've been going about my own learning- I use Treehouse on my laptop, but then have some other coding/coding game apps on my phone for quick reference and learning while on the go, have multiple books to digest the material via a different medium, and watch some other videos to help reinforce what I've learned. I've also be reading through the Python Community forums to read what other people are experiencing and thinking about how I would tackle the problem or answer their question.

I try to engage in a lot of different method of learning so that I'm surrounded by my decision to learn to code. It keeps my motivation high and helps me retain and actually use what I've learned. It takes a lot of hard work and time to get to a point where you feel you can freely wield a programming language- it's ok to feel like you know nothing at all- it's all part of the process.

Best of luck with your studies!