well...

Dear Rich,

Don't give up. Be patient with yourself and don't expect miracles overnight. Everyone learns at their own pace and yours is just fine. You'll be glad you stuck with it.

Love,

Future Rich

It's a language. If you are learning a foreign language, there is a steep learning curve til you get it. You shouldn't expect a programming language to seep into bones overnight. Here's another perspective. I am, ahem, quite mature and am learning program languages for the first time. Yes, I do know html and css quite well, but they aren't programming languages. Last quarter I tackled SQL, C#, and JavaScript. If I can maintain a 4.0 doing this at my age, you can conquer JavaScript. Give it time and a lot of practice.

A related suggestion: I do all the exercises in Notepad++ so that I have a library of snippets to refer back to.

Hey! I read this blog a little while ago and I refer to it every time i get down about coding. Most of my friends are programmers and can attest to it. dude give it a read. It puts things into perspective.

http://www.vikingcodeschool.com/posts/why-learning-to-code-is-so-damn-hard

I am myself in the desert of despair phase, of learning how to code. if you stick with it the upswing of awesome does happen.

just the whole logic of it. It's like I'm in a fog...and can't wrap my head around it...

What are you having problems with? Is it the code or the concept of a Boolean?

Maybe its not the place to say this, but again maybe it is! I apologize if this has already been said.

I stopped studying for a couple weeks :-/ and when I came back I found myself in a place I didn't understand and it was really frustrating and I was feeling helpless, but then I get an idea to go back to the beginning of the project I was working on and just start over with it (not the beginning of the video, but the beginning video of the particular series where they introduced the new workspace), and things started to click and get exciting, and now I'm doing amazing!

Also... if you have the type of attention span that makes it hard to focus, do yourself a favor, and go to http://evernote.com, and make a free account if you don't already have one. Take DETAILED notes as you go with the two different browser windows open: treehouse in one window, and a workspace and an Evernote tab in the other. That alone's been really helpful, so that before I need to go back a video or two, because I don't understand, I can go back to my Evernotes, (since not all the courses have the teacher's script on them anymore..)

Anyways... I hope this helps anyone who comes across it and is feeling discouraged.

The goal of $60K is enough annually to make me not want to give up. (some CSharp coders make $100K A YEAR..)

Just sayin! Stick it out!

RICH!!!! I think I see now what you were talking about.. Boolean is weird and it's hard to understand. Let me know if this helps...

With Boolean, there are only two answers.. true or false. AS YOU ALREADY KNOW.

However, in the video, when Dave changed something like this: (example)

var greenHouseGasIsBad = 'true';

and said

if(greenHouseGas) { alert('<p>Greenhouse gas tastes great!</p>'); }

and it worked.. I was like... WHAT!???

It's because with Boolean, the only options you have are true and false. if(2===2), the answer is true, so you follow through on the following action.

Later on in the Boolean test when they ask:

What does this condition evaluate to: true or false? ( true && false )

The reason the answer is FALSE is because the system reads this as

(if true = true) AND (if false = true)

and that outputs as 'false'.

Sorry for the long post.. but a light bulb went off in my head and it all clicked when I realized that. Does that make sense?

The cool thing about Booleans is that they are simple *only True or False, yet complicated enough. Same boat man but I think I already got it after a while.

Rich, I am right where you are at the moment, very discouraged, however I think that is why this is worth pursuing even more. Once through the gauntlet of self doubt and defeatism I think we'll both come out of this with good results. var results = ("good"); (see, I think my syntax is wrong there..) I'm rootin for ya! keep on keepin on!

What i love about this discussion and this project is the wonderful community and the wonderful group of people(soldiers) who are ready to carry you on their shoulders when you are tired or about to give up. Keep going on Chris and this is from a guy who did not know what microsoft is before 3 years. God bless y'all. Thank you.