Learning & Memorizing In Programming

[Music] hey what's going on guys in this video I just want to talk a little bit about learning practices and memorization in programming okay and it could be web development it can be you know any kind of programming or coding and the reason that I'm making this video what really prompted me or gave me the idea to do it is because I got a comment on one of my videos last week that said brain brad's brain is like Wikipedia which is a very flattering comment to get I enjoyed reading and I appreciate it but it's just simply not true at all I do so much research and just looking stuff up I have files and files of snippets that I refer to constantly this stuff that I do these almost 600 videos on my channel courses that I do it's not all in my head you know it's not memorized as far as all the code itself and stuff like that like I don't just sit down and start typing up applications I do a lot of looking stuff up and research sometimes it takes me a day or two to figure one thing out so and I think that's the norm you know it I don't have any factual numbers or anything like that but for my experience what I would say is like 97% of developers work that way I think that searching Google and Stack Overflow on sites like that I think that's a skill in itself and I think that that's part a big part of the workflow of being a developer you know you don't just read one book or watch one course and just and you have it you have to keep referring to different sources you have to create your own snippets I would highly recommend having a folder on your either your local machine or maybe like a github gist fold or something like that where you have like a lot of common scripts and pieces of code that you constantly use one example would be a kind of a silly example when I started learning nodejs and Express I had a snippet of just a basic Express server like will you just bring it in initialize it create a route and do Abdallah listen that's silly little snippet I had to refer to for months and it's not because I didn't get the understand the code I did I member I memorized the the concepts of the code but I couldn't remember that the exact syntax and the exact characters to type and I think that the most important part is remembering the concepts now that it's it seems ridiculous that I even had to refer to something for that and that will happen you will memorize the code but don't focus so much on that focus on knowing and understanding what it's doing and what the concept is a good quote that I read this morning actually on reddit when I was doing some research is probably gonna butcher this but it's something like if you memorize one path in the forest you will only get out if you always start and end in the same place and I think that that's very relevant to coding because you very very rarely start and end in the same place you're basically thrown right in the middle of the friggin forest every time you know you get these code bases thrown at you that other people wrote you're using different frameworks you're using different languages and syntax so very rarely do you start and finish in the same place so just memorizing that one piece of code or that one path it's not gonna really help you you want to understand the entire forest basically I know that's kind of a corny metaphor or whatever but I think it applies really well with with programming so you know I just wanted to make this video so that people understand that when they watch me or other other content creators you know we we're doing the same things you guys are we're still searching our errors we're still searching how to do stuff how to add stuff to our applications and all that and of course being a content creator I'm constantly doing research because I need to keep learning so that I can keep teaching but you know you guys don't get discouraged if you have if you have to look something up don't feel like you know this isn't for you or your mind isn't capable of doing what other people do so if you're memorizing concepts like let's let's take a loop for example or a conditional something simple just about every programming language has these and they all basically work the same now the syntax is different like it a loop and JavaScript is different than a loop and Ruby which is a completely different language it's not even a C syntax language but the fundamentals of the loop are the same so it's easier when you learn your first language it's easier to learn your second because you already know these basic things I actually thought about creating a course on just programming in general know language just the basic control structures and that's how people learn four or five six languages which when you're starting out it seems insane like you could never do that like this guy's a god you know it was seven languages but basically they're all the same except the syntax is different which you can easily look up now some languages are obviously harder than others because some are you know statically typed some are more low-level where you need to you need to actually write more code to integrate with the system some are higher level and easier but you know the core control structures and things like that are the same even with frameworks with like react and angular if if I shouldn't say react because it doesn't really have its own library its own HTTP library but like fetch like the fetch API if you know how to use that it's very easy to learn Axios because it's it's basically the same thing it's just the syntax is a little different but you understand what it's doing and the fundamentals alright so another thing is is learning tutorials courses those are very important obviously that's how I make my living but it's not all there is to learning it's it's one I think it's 1/2 because it's guided and you're watching someone else do it you're following along you're learning the basics but what you're not getting is is you diving in and in thinking critically doing your own searches and stuff like that so what I what I recommend is when you take these courses and these tutorials to take the concepts remember memorize the concepts not necessarily the exact code and take that and build something else with those concepts and if you're not at that level yet then at least maybe add to it so if you have a course where you create like a real estate app that lists houses or whatever like a reactor and Express app something like that maybe you could add a Google map listing to each each entry each house I think that's a good example of you getting in and getting your hands dirty without watching a tutorial you know you'll be digging through the Google API Docs and doing stuff that real programmers do it can be very aggravating sometimes it can take you know hours or even days to find the answer but that's that's this industry really it's it's not all smooth tutorials you know that's why I like to leave a lot of my mistakes in my courses and tutorials because I think it's more real life than just a cookie cutter clean you know perfectly done tutorial so that would be my recommendation for learning and that's what I do if people are wondering why I have or how I have so many videos on different frameworks and stuff like that that's how I learn I look at the documentation usually first and then watch a tutorial or read a blog post or article maybe take a course or part of a course and I'll take those concepts and I'll build something on my own from it and then I'll do a video on it all right so it's never just just the tutorial and then copying it or something it's it's making it my own and I think that's the best way to learn I think that's what's gonna benefit you guys the most but that's really and I just wanted to kind of do a quick video as a lot of you know I was in the process of moving where we are pretty much settled now I got my my office space which I may do a tour of soon but you know I will be pumping out the tutorials more and let me know if you guys like this type of format where I'm just kind of you know talking off the top of my head I'm usually a little more scripted with slideshows and stuff like that but I don't know I figured I'd try something different so let me know if you like it if you do like the video please leave it alike and you know if you're not subscribed and you like this type of stuff please consider subscribing and that's it thanks guys

Channel: Traversy Media

Views: 240,938

Keywords: programming, coding, programming help, self help, motivation, learn programming, memorizing code, how to code

Id: askbjJx-BQg

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018