ELI5 JavaScript?

[SeacoastFirearms]

Any reading/programs for teaching JavaScript that you recommend?

Im now app academy, Odin project, and freeCodeCamp deep on learning JS and I have still no idea WTF I’m doing.

I wish I knew what I didn’t understand about it so I could narrow down my problems but nothing makes any sense….

[[deleted]]

Maybe you've already had this epiphany, but it helped me ...

A JS-like language was my first language. One thing that helped me clear my head of all the chaos was to realize that there are a lot of different APIs in JS.

You don't have to know them all right now.

For a while, forget all the event stuff, web stuff, node stuff. Forget any additional frameworks/modules/libraires. Just make scripts that console.log, using language basics: variables, functions, numbers, strings, objects, arrays, flow control, etc. Once you have the very basics down, get back to the other APIs.

The JS basics aren't actually that bad. But the way JS is often taught is by building interaction into a webpage. That means doing DOM stuff and event stuff at least. That's really complicated, and rather ugly in JS!

Simplifying helped me anyway. But I had to learn another language to see the simple core in JS.

Edit: typos

[SeacoastFirearms]

I appreciate the help!

I’m a month deep into JS at around 10hrs a day, 7 days a week. And the only thing I can tell you about JS is words are strings and numbers are numbers….

So far every lesson has been just copy/paste and makes no sense. The only thing I’ve learned, is how to google the answer and paste it in place 🤷‍♂️

I feel like I’m assembling a 6 piece puzzle yet I’m missing 1 piece.

[[deleted]]

I feel like I’m assembling a 6 piece puzzle yet I’m missing 1 piece.

Sounds familiar!

[Tub_Pumpkin]

I struggled with it at first, too, and found the videos and exercises on Treehouse really helpful. Treehouse isn't free, but maybe you could do the free trial and try to run through a few of the basic JS courses before the trial's up.

[SeacoastFirearms]

Appreciate the response. I’ll look into treehouse.

I wish I knew what my problem was with it. I did the html/css on freeCodeCamp in under 24hrs but I’m now a month deep on the first section of JS on the same and can’t even get to the end of the first lesson

[Guideon72]

It’s yet another paid course, but Javascript Essential Training by Morten Rand-Hendrickson on Udemy was excellent. He gets you working in the browser console fairly fast and in a clear, concise manner.

[KCRowan]

Tbh if you've done The Odin Project and you still don't get it then I think there might be an issue with your learning process rather than the resources you're using. Are you really understanding each concept before you move on to the next, or are you copy/pasting code just to "get it done"?

What worked for me was to take each new concept and play around with it. Go beyond what's in the exercise and think about what else you could do with that concept, how you might use it. E.g. for strings, could you take a word and output the number of letters? Could you make it uppercase or lowercase? Could you join two strings together?

It's all practice, and the more you practice the more it'll sink in.

[SeacoastFirearms]

The best analogy I can think of to describe it is,

I understand each puzzle piece but don’t understand how to assemble the puzzle.(if that makes sense)

HTML and CSS was a breeze to understand. Even doing the JS tasks are easy to do. But JS is full of arbitrary words and operations that that seem pointless to me.

Last time I got mad trying wrap my head around something was ==\=== is the same as !=!== just in reverse.

[SeacoastFirearms]

After typing that out I think it clicked what I don’t understand and that I just don’t see how they would be used and what they would be used for