Learning to Code, Part 4

After look­ing around at the Q&A forums at Codecad­e­my and find­ing that most of the oth­er begin­ners are as lost as I am, I’ve decid­ed that maybe I’m stuck on the cur­rent les­son because the author just isn’t very good, rather than because I can’t under­stand the con­tent. A friend has offered to write up a tuto­r­i­al for me going over the same mate­r­i­al, and I’ve also request­ed a book from the library. Between those two, I should be able to get past this hump.

In the mean­time, I’ve dis­cov­ered that I can link to my pro­file there as a lit­tle brag, show­ing all the cours­es I’ve com­plet­ed! It’s a small thing, but I like it.

I decid­ed to splurge and give Lynda.com, which is NOT free, a try, as it was also rec­om­mend­ed by Life­hack­er. A month­ly fee gives you unlim­it­ed access to all of their tuto­ri­als, and there are scads of them. They had all the sub­jects in which I am cur­rent­ly inter­est­ed, and the fee is less than the price of one tech­ni­cal book.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, watch­ing a video, even while fol­low­ing along with the exer­cise files, just isn’t as effec­tive for me as doing exer­cis­es hands-on a la Codecad­e­my. I have got­ten a bet­ter intro­duc­tion to the Fun­da­men­tals of Pro­gram­ming from Lynda.com, but then I watched a video course ded­i­cat­ed sole­ly to that top­ic. Of course, if you learn bet­ter from videos, you might find it the bee’s knees. I am lik­ing the fact that I can watch the videos on my iPad, and appar­ent­ly, I could also access them from my phone if I wished to watch on a tiny screen.

I’ll keep using the site for the rest of the month since I’ve paid for it, but I don’t think I’ll be renew­ing after the one-month trial.