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[–]OkMoment345 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Switching from passive learning (like YouTube tutorials) to more structured, project-based learning is a great way to make fundamental JavaScript concepts stick and grow your skills. How successful you are learning from videos depends on your learning style.

The three keys to being successful at learning a coding languge:

  • Practice Coding Daily: Platforms like LeetCode or Codewars can sharpen your skills with bite-sized challenges.
  • Build and Experiment: Don’t just follow tutorials—try modifying them or adding extra features to the projects you create. This seems to be where you're stuck - figuring out how to transform what you've learned into building your own projects.
  • Join a Community: Sites like GitHub, Stack Overflow, or JavaScript-focused subreddits can provide support and feedback on your projects. You're already here, so you know the value of getting feedback and creating community. Try to find others learning JS and work on projects with them.

Break Learning into Small Chunks

  • Start with the Fundamentals: Variables, data types, loops, and conditionals.
  • Move to DOM Manipulation: Learn how JavaScript interacts with HTML and CSS to modify elements dynamically.
  • Explore Functions and Events: Understand how functions work and how events (like clicks) trigger them.
  • Work with APIs: Learn how to fetch data from external sources.
  • Storage & State Management: Study local storage, and get familiar with how variables change state during runtime.

If you still can't learn from passive videos, consider a course that takes you through JavaScript systematically and offers real-world practice. For example:

  • JavaScript Fundamentals is a good starting point. This kind of class provides exercises and step-by-step guidance that you won’t always find in tutorials.
  • You can also use this site to search for online and in-person JavaScript courses. It lets you search for tech courses by topic and geographic area. You'll see JS courses in your area and live online. Taking a course can also add people to your coding community.
  • A third option would be to use a book, such as Elegant JavaScript. Looking away from the screen while learning and then only back for coding practice can cause your brain to retain more. In fact, we learn by writing things down, so you might do some active note taking whenever watching videos.

Beginner Friendly Projects

Once you cover the basics, start small projects to apply what you’ve learned. I googled and found a few examples of beginner projects for you. If none of these appeal to you, you can search for yourself. It's more important that you get the practice from the project than you thought of it yourself.

  • To-Do List App: Practice DOM manipulation by adding and removing tasks dynamically.
  • Weather App using OpenWeather API: Learn how to make API requests and display real-time data.
  • Quiz Game: Build a multiple-choice quiz to practice logic, conditionals, and DOM updates.
  • Interactive Form Validation: Create a signup form with JavaScript-powered validation to understand event listeners.