You Don't Know JS: Up & Going

Foreword

What was the last new thing you learned?

Perhaps it was a foreign language, like Italian or German. Or maybe it was a graphics editor, like Photoshop. Or a cooking technique or woodworking or an exercise routine. I want you to remember that feeling when you finally got it: the lightbulb moment. When things went from blurry to crystal clear, as you mastered the table saw or understood the difference between masculine and feminine nouns in French. How did it feel? Pretty amazing, right?

Now I want you to travel back a little bit further in your memory to right before you learned your new skill. How did that feel? Probably slightly intimidating and maybe a little bit frustrating, right? At one point, we all did not know the things that we know now, and that’s totally OK; we all start somewhere. Learning new material is an exciting adventure, especially if you are looking to learn the subject efficiently.

I teach a lot of beginner coding classes. The students who take my classes have often tried teaching themselves subjects like HTML or JavaScript by reading blog posts or copying and pasting code, but they haven’t been able to truly master the material that will allow them to code their desired outcome. And because they don’t truly grasp the ins and outs of certain coding topics, they can’t write powerful code or debug their own work because they don’t really understand what is happening.

I always believe in teaching my classes the proper way, meaning I teach web ...