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JavaScript Interactive Web Pages with JavaScript Traversing and Manipulating the DOM with JavaScript Perform: Traversing Elements with children

This course is absolutely horrible to understand. Can anyone suggest any external resources?

Through out this front end developer course, I've had no problems whatsoever while learning from Dave, Nick and Guil and everything was easy to understand with lots of practice code. But, with Andrew, its so hard to follow what he is doing and I'm having to watch each video 3-4 times to even understand what he's trying to accomplish. Moreover, the quizzes are absolutely lacking and do not represent what is being covered in the videos.

Can someone please suggest me an alternative source? I know JavaScript is very important and I don't want to learn it in a subpar way.

Totally agree, he does not explain anything worth a damn. I thought it was only me having that problem

13 Answers

You're right about the quizzes. I also feel that they do not add anything of value to this course. With that said, I found this course to be well taught and useful as an Intermediate level course. It does require a student to be very comfortable with a lot of the basics. Reading through many of the questions posted to this course in particular, I think that a number of students may have overestimated their readiness for something like this. To those who struggle with this course, I would suggest holding off and first going through these two Treehouse JS courses: https://teamtreehouse.com/library/javascript-basics and https://teamtreehouse.com/library/javascript-loops-arrays-and-objects. After completing those two, or revisiting them, come back to this course.

Here's why I liked this course. There is a lot packed into it. Not just in exposing students to new JavaScript and DOM features, but also in exposing students to a simple way to deconstruct a problem and then building a solution to that problem. The approach of outlining the solution first in pseudocode, then building the solution in chunks, repeatedly testing new blocks of code as they are added, is good and is taught in other schools/mediums. I also thought it was handy to see how he looks in the MDN documentation for a function, property, etc. to achieve a programmatic goal; this is a more realistic scenario than always knowing what specific function, property, etc., you can use ahead of time. Reminding, or teaching, students to think about blocks of code that do the same thing and then rewriting them into their own functions is also a universal approach applied to programming.

Programming isn't easy at first, but does become faster and more intuitive with time and lots of practice. You'll notice similarities in programming languages and even recognize solution patterns as you progress in your learning. Everyone struggles along the way so don't give up if you enjoyed learning everything else to this point. Take a step back and try to figure out what you struggled with and then spend some time reviewing and learning more about those topics.

Danny Dickson
Danny Dickson
19,293 Points

I'm going to play devil's advocate here. I agree that following the prerequisites that you suggest are useful, and got to this class after having taken both of the courses you list in your comment. I am currently working through the Full Stack JavaScript Track, and got to this course. Andrew's style is a stark contrast to that of Dave McFarland. You go from being spoon-fed (metaphorically speaking of course) to riding without training wheels. I know I personally appreciated the additional background information (aka dumbing down) that Dave provides, as opposed to Andrew's "I assume you already know this," sentiment. I am able to follow along, but I find myself asking, "wait, what?" and having to rewind to fully grasp as I go through these videos. I won't go so far as others before me to say that the class is worthless, but it was noticeably less robust than some of the courses leading up to it. That's my 2 cents. I still plan to continue through the course, and eventually the entire track, but did feel it necessary to chime in on this one. Cheers.

Mike McDermott
seal-mask
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree
Mike McDermott
Front End Web Development Techdegree Student 13,093 Points

This course didn't need to be so confusing. I found courses on YouTube and Lynda.com that were much clearer and easier to follow. I also needed to supplement Andrew's JQuery course with books and outside videos.

Bruno Dias
Bruno Dias
10,554 Points

The jQuery course is horrible. I had to buy a book to understand better what jQuery is.

Ryan Buchholtz
Ryan Buchholtz
11,210 Points

I don't know if this will help. But it's my blog post about how I made sense of this course work. It's long, so be prepared! I went into micro-steps so that I could fully understand the lesson.

Cheers!

http://ryanscottbuchholtz.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-simple-to-do-list-in-javascript-isnt.html

Dekin O'Sullivan
Dekin O'Sullivan
10,749 Points

Ahah, Ryan what you did is amazing... and exactly the proof of everything that is wrong with this course and Andrew's teachings! You shouldn't have to be forced to these extremes when you pay money for a course, the teacher should have done this work for you.

Henri CLOCUH
Henri CLOCUH
31,209 Points

Very good job Ryan, I at last understood that course, Thanks!

aBadBean A
aBadBean A
2,440 Points

Thank you, I am always amazed and grateful that people will invest so much of there time helping others out. You rock!

Peter Tomasiewicz
Peter Tomasiewicz
5,592 Points

Thank U Ryan, really helpful !

Dekin O'Sullivan
Dekin O'Sullivan
10,749 Points

Kalidh, completely agree with you: Andrew sucks big time compared to most other teachers at treehouse. What a shame cause this is important material... I hope we get as little as possible from Andrew in the future...

Jared Bothwell
Jared Bothwell
7,031 Points

I agree with the sentiments. I find this course very unhelpful.

Ivan Saveliev
Ivan Saveliev
9,153 Points

I can agree on most statements here. Though Andrew brings a good practice of using documentation to find answers, eh often uses phrases "take this, do this, go there, to accomplish this" without saying exactly what. I feel pretty confident in most stuff he is saying but even then sometimes i'm getting lost and lose attention to what hes is trying to say.

I already acquired useful skills and techniques from Andrew, but frankly I believe that I can understand what he is saying because I'm already working in IT and generally understand how stuff is working.

Andrew is actually great but he has to work on the way he expresses what he is doing, so absolute newbies can understand even if it take more time for the video.

I absolutely disagree about that this course is intended for intermediate guys etc. We have a track here and it has to be built the way i can understand each next stage easily. Real world practice should be gained after the track is done so I know what tool set I have, so when I design a website I think: Ok, here i will add some CSS to do this and that, maybe some animation, here i will add some JavaScript do accomplish this or that. But to thinks this way you have to know in general what tools are used for this and then master them.

evan rost
PLUS
evan rost
Courses Plus Student 13,971 Points

everyone has there own learning styles. i think andrew is a good javascript teacher.

here is another good javascript resource http://jstherightway.org/

jason chan
jason chan
31,009 Points

http://eloquentjavascript.net/ you may read this book.

Don't be afraid to pick up books and read them.

For programming to figure things out. Ask yourself what does this do?

Mike Considine
Mike Considine
31,337 Points

Chalkers is easily the worst teacher on treehouse. It's night and day between him and literally any other professor on this website. To everyone else: you are doing a great job. Chalkers: I think you could use a little more training

Craig Campbell
Craig Campbell
14,428 Points

You Don't Know JS is an AWESOME book and its free on Github (or you could pay for print copies). link https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

You could also try Javascript: The Good Parts, but you'd have to pay for the book.

And, for the record, I found Chalkers to be an awesome teacher. :) But to each his own!

Thanks for all the resources guys,

bobgoblin, thank you for the motivation and yes, as you said, at one point I thought I was going to throw in the towel, but then I visited codeschool and their JS roadtrip course was exceptional. Was able to learn a lot and helped me get through the JS challenges on here. Thanks once again guys!

jason chan
jason chan
31,009 Points

http://nodeschool.io/#workshoppers you can learn from your console. LOLs.

Yonatan Medan
Yonatan Medan
3,943 Points

Try eloquent javascript it's a free online book with practice it's a bit hard but youl fill like u npknow javascript way better