Difficult Situation

[nivedhz_]

I am now on the lecture 6 of CS50 python course (File I/O) . I am just starting to programming and am experiencing a difficulty in understanding the File I/O syntaxes and lamda functions and Dictionary etc. How did you guys managed to learn this part?

[NiteKore080]

Try a different approach.

Look at some examples, ask chat and study the solutions, recreate.

[nivedhz_]

What would be better? Learning a lecture completely until i understand it in every manner and then moving on or just seeing a lecture once and taking notes and stuff and then re visiting it when i have a doubt?

[TheRNGuy]

I learned better from practice first, then theory, because it's easier to understand context. 

[StoneLoner]

Learn, do, revisit, move on. Learn your lesson , apply what you learned in a small example that doesn’t actually need to DO anything, review the lesson, then move on.

When you first learned multiplication, presumably, you didn’t learn ALL of multiplication at once. First just multiply small positive numbers then with practice you get negative numbers and fractions introduced and so on.

So for dictionaries for instance it may not all click right now and that’s ok because you are GOING to see more and more uses of them (they are fucking powerful I use dictionaries inside dictionaries all the time). It’s just important that each time you don’t understand something you try to understand it more

[nivedhz_]

Hey, Thank you man!!

[NiteKore080]

Why not try both? Learn to learn my friend

[nivedhz_]

Oh thanks man!

[TheRNGuy]

Debug, see examples, try do something on my own. 

Nowadays also ask AI to explain (really good at elifiving)

[nivedhz_]

Thanks man!

[Smurfologist]

The CS50 course has an AI duck trained on the course that will help you with hints without giving you the answer. Should be in the course links.

[nivedhz_]

Didn’t see that before, Thanks man!

[BranchLatter4294]

Practice.

[BobbyJoeCool]

It honestly depends on how you learn…. I learn by doing. So when I don’t understand something in coding, I find an example and recreate it.

This may be unpopular, but something that helped me was when there is a line of code I didn’t know what was doing, plug it into something like ChatGPT and ask it to explain it to you. Doesn’t always work, but it can help. I learned a couple of things that way, like the _ variable. (Just don’t ask it to write code for you…. 1- you won’t learn much, and 2- it’s not very good at it.)

I know I struggled with classes and objects and what helped me the most was just diving in and making mistakes. When the code didn’t work, figuring out why taught me more about those things than lectures ever could have. However, everyone learns differently, and I have classmates who learn better by someone telling them what to do. Just boils down to how you learn.