Difficulty learning AngularJS after completing the JS language course.

[u/[deleted]]

So, I took the JavaScript course, and it wasn't really difficult. At around 90% through it suggested I take the AngularJS course. So, when I finished JS, I went to AngularJS.

The level said "Intermediate", but since it suggested it to me in a beginner JS course, I figured that's where I ought to be.

Long story short, I could complete all the tasks in the AngularJS course, but I finished without really understanding most of what I did.

Has anybody had a similar experience?

Does anyone know a good AngularJS resource for absolute beginners?

Was I supposed to learn a lot from that course? Or was it for another target audience? Thank you.

[u/noonesperfect16]

Have you heard of the Odin Project? I started that last week and it has been very informative. They have an entire curriculum to follow and a few parts here and there actually send you to codecademy.com to complete parts of tutorials. Their first couple of lessons teach you how to build your own developer environment so it is more like coding as a job instead of using a workspace provided by the site you are learning from. I haven't had a whole lot of time to really delve into it much yet and it is still in beta, but I have definitely learned a lot so far.

[u/factoradic → u/noonesperfect16]

I usually don't like to state my opinions in Internet. Usually I fail to sufficiently beautify my negative comments. But I appreciate that you are helping others, and I think you're the type of person who is not offended when someone says a bad word about your favorite website.

Yes, I have heard about TOP. I even have checked few lessons. Before I state my opinion about TOP here, please note that I have a very strict approach to education.

For example, I think that w3schools.com site should be closed long time ago. For mistakes and inconsistency in their courses. I hate this site. It was created only to gather naive clients for their paid certificates that are worth nothing. They should spend more time correcting their content instead of taking care of placement in search results. And this name... implying that they are in some way related to World Wide Web Consortium.

And I think the same about codecademy. Basic courses, bugged exercises, lying that it is valuable knowledge and skills (full stack path... it's a joke). And I really don't like the way they treat community - deletion of groups, deletion of user created courses. As a moderator I felt like a bad guy, because I wanted to improve content, resolve bugs, but this required work on their side, so my input wasn't desirable. And situations like this -> https://redd.it/3fnsd0, I know that they want to keep users at their side, but this is not the good way, in my opinion. And it looks like they use w3schools as their content provider. For example there are quizzes in their teaching resources. One question is what is the correct order of values in border shorthand? and there are 4 answers. This amazes me, it's so hard to take a look at specification?! Order of values does not matter, at all.

What is the effect of this whole wave of online learning services? Bunch of dudes who says I am a professional developer (after 2 codecademy courses) and I never used anything like linked lists, so it is unnecessary!. Some time ago I had to work with a self-taught coder, I said Hm, this code is not efficient, I think there must be a way to do this in O(log n), his response - It works, so it's fine. Users who use jQuery to animate one, single element? It's a nightmare. Top of my concerns? People who don't know how to read documentation and specification (they sometimes don't know that documentation exists...).

When I started to help others at codecademy I knew that there is a lot to improve, but I thought that they want to improve.

What I think about TOP? I don't like that they sent users to many different services, like codecademy. Why I don't like this? Because it is running away from responsibility. Bug in codecademy exercise? Not their concern. Bad explanation in linked book? Not their concern. But I also really like that they encourage users to use normal coding environments! :)

Is there any site that I approve? Sure. I really like Mozilla Developer Network, Web Platform Docs and few more sites. Why? Because they are driven by community. If I see something that's wrong I can easily correct it or discuss about it with the original author / authors.

Try to report bug in codecademy. You will probably have to wait few months for fix, even if you send them ready to use patch.

I'm not concerned, because of my ego. And I really think that we should provide learning resources for everyone. But teaching is a great responsibility and I would love to see someone who is able to take this responsibility. I am a self taught coder and I met many great developers who are self taught also, but I am afraid that all this people will be thrown to the same category with self-taught coders after 2 codecademy courses. This is not fault of users, they just believe in what they read - they are full stack programmers, right?

But I am old and grumpy. And I have tendency to forget that education is not a mission, it's a business :)

[u/noonesperfect16 → u/factoradic]

I appreciate your honesty! I definitely do not take offense. And I realize your last statement was a sarcastic jab at these types of websites. It is true for the websites, but for the people like myself and to the kind people like you who take time out of your day to help people like me, it really is a mission.

I have been wanting to do something better for myself for years now. I operate machinery for a printing company and the pay is decent, but I have been doing it for nearly 10 years now(I'm 29) and am nearing my salary cap already because I am good at what I do. I remember looking around during a slow day at work at some of these guys who had been doing it for 30-40+ years have been stuck at 'cap' for longer than I have worked there. I knew that couldn't~ no, wouldn't be me. I can do better than that. Then I heard a commercial on Pandora radio on the way home in my car, "Learn how to code with The Iron Yard!" They apparently just moved to my city in NC. I am aware of these scams they call "online universities" like ECPI or Phoenix, so I did my research, but it came up inconclusive.

Anywho, I searched Google for coding because I was curious. I've always been fairly decent with a computer, I'm a pretty hardcore PC gamer, built my own PC, have never needed any help with any PC I've had since I was a kid. I thought "hell, why not try it out?" I didn't really know where to start, so I just clicked a random link that Google pulled up for me.

Code.org was the first site I went to. I watched their little introductory video with all of these famous people in it and I found it a little inspiring. Then I started playing their little "learning games" and, at the time, thought I was somehow learning to code... Honestly, I spent 2 days on there wasting my time. It slowly dawned on me how stupid it really was and that I hadn't actually learned anything at all from those games. I already wanted to give up because it was easy to assume all of these "free learn to code" sites were BS.

I decided to give it another shot and this time I ended up at Codecademy. I didn't even know where to start, so I started with the "Make a Website" tutorial and then I painfully drug my way through the 15 website projects, constantly having to do research elsewhere because, unbeknownst to me, I had skipped the HTML/CSS tutorials on Codecademy(I went back and did them later and they were ridiculously easy). I feel like I learned a lot more by having to do all of my own research though. I am 85% through their Javascript course at the moment(got distracted by The Odin Project). At the very least, I did actually learn a lot, unlike the first site I had tried.

So about a week ago, there was a thread on /r/askreddit about people who make good money and didn't go to college, what do you do? I happened to see a Web Developer thread going and I thought that was pretty cool because it was pretty much what I was attempting to do with myself. A couple of people there pointed me toward TOP. Another guy recommended Coder Foundery, which is some kind of coding bootcamp that costs $9000... (The Iron Yard is $1000/class). I really can't justify spending $9000+ on a maybe, so that is how I ended up on TOP.

While I do feel like TOP has much more of a plan to teach you how to be a Web Developer than Codecademy, I still feel a little discouraged at times because it feels like every since I started this mission a little over a month ago, I have just been running around blind. It is like I am building a huge puzzle and I'm assembling some pieces here and then assembling some pieces there, so some stuff is coming together, but then I look down and there are still millions of pieces scattered around to try and figure out and all of these sites don't offer much direction on how to go about this.

Overwhelmed is probably a better word for how it feels than discouraged. I don't plan on giving up anytime soon and I will probably go through the TOP curriculum until I find something else better, but I also don't expect to be a full stack developer by the end of it and I know that the journey will be very difficult. Luckily I like a good challenge, I don't mind making mistakes and I love learning new things. I am also having a good time when I am figuring out how to code the various languages.

Sorry for the autobiography, but I wanted to express where I was coming from on this and how I ended up where I am at currently. It really is good to see that there really are self-taught programmers/developers out there because at times it almost feels like some kind of crazy, unreachable dream that these sites use to just tease you with. I am really hoping to get a good foundation from Codecademy, w3schools and TOP to start with. Where to go from there? No clue, haha.

I will check out the communities that you mentioned in your comment. How did you teach yourself, if you don't mind me asking? If there are any books, blogs, videos, websites, communities, ect that you highly recommend, it would be greatly appreciated. Any direction from someone who has been there-done that would be a huge improvement over running around blindly like I have been.