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Study Tips

Reading and exploring existing code is often the fastest way to learn programming. Sure, it's important to write a lot of code, get stuck, fix your problems, and build cool things. But how can you expect to write great code if you've never seen any before?

Learning to run, explain, and modify existing code is a crucial skill to learn early in your programming life. Besides being an effective learning strategy, this is also what you'll spend most of your time doing as a programmer.

  • Don't rush, understand.
  • Study the examples! Understanding and experimenting with working code is
  • It's better to study slowly and learn from your mistakes than to code quickly and not understand what you wrote.
  • Write lots of comments in the examples and exercises. The code in this repository is yours to study, modify and re-use in projects.
  • Practice Pair Programming: two people, one computer.

Read, Modify, Create

Think of these three steps in your learning each time you encounter a new skill or language feature in programming. Even experienced developers go through these steps when learning new technologies!

  1. Read: Learn to step through, predict, and understand code that other people wrote.
  2. Modify: Learn to change the behavior of other people's code with small modifications.
  3. Create: Learn to write your own code from an empty page.

Don't worry about making to Create as fast as possible. The more time you spend learning to Read and Modify, the better you will master Create.

Hashtags

There's so many examples and exercises in this repository, it's easy to forget of what you still need to finish or what you want to review again. Luckily VSCode is really good at searching through folders of code.

You can write hashtags in your comments while you're studying, then search for those hashtags later so you don't miss anything. Here's some ideas:

  • // #todo, still a few blanks left - search for #todo in Study Lenses or VScode to find all the exercises you still need to study
  • // #review, coercion is confusing this again next week - search for #review to find the files you need to study again
  • ... anything goes! Find the hashtags that work for you

Study Board

Creating a project board on your GitHub account for tracking your study at HYF can help you keep track of everything you're learning. You can create the board at this link: https://github.com/your_user_name?tab=projects.

These 4 columns may be helpful:

  • todo: material you have not studied yet
  • studying: material you are currently studying
  • to review: material you want to review again in the future
  • learned: material you know well enough that you could help your classmates learn it

Learning from Code

Some tips for learning the most from each program you study.

Read the code out loud

Learning to read your code aloud and to pronounce the strange syntax in JavaScript is super important! Practice alone, practice with a friend, record yourself and play it back. When you watch video tutorials pay close attention and practice repeating how the teacher pronounces their code.

  • Is new vocabulary you don't understand?
  • What JS syntax do you recognize?
  • What syntax is new to you?
  • How should you pronounce the code?

This might not seem interesting at first, but reading each line of code out loud will help you pay attention to details you might miss otherwise.

Predict what will happen

before running the code

  • Will there be an error? What kind of error? On which line?
  • What values will be in memory at the beginning of the script? At the middle? At the end?
  • Which line of code will execute first? second? third? ... last?
  • Which test cases will pass, and which will fail? Why?

Run the code and explain

without stepping through

  • Was there an error? What kind of error? Why?
  • Which test cases passed, and which failed? Why?
  • What values were logged to the console? Why those values?
  • What can you learn about program memory from the output?
  • What can you learn about the order of execution from the program output?

Visualize program memory

Browser Debugger, JS Tutor

Step through line by line and take turns explaining every other step:

  1. Which line executed before the current one? What did that line do?
  2. What does the current line of code change in program memory?
  3. Which line of code will execute next? What will that line do?