I struggled mightily with this week’s Codecademy lessons. I knew that JavaScript relied heavy on logical values and statements to perform its functions, but I did not anticipate just how difficult these things would be to comprehend.

I worked on lessons one, two, and three prior to the June 7 class so that I could at least have a basic understanding of what our lecture that night was going to cover. I was able to make it through lessons one and two fairly easily and with few issues. Lesson three, however, proved to be a different beast. No matter how many times I re-read the descriptions and instructions, there were certain steps that I was unable to perform correctly and move past. For the first time this semester, I was forced to use the “get a hint” and “get the code” tools during this lesson module. I’m not happy about having to do that, to say the least, but it was a necessary step in order for me to proceed through the exercises. I went back through each lesson and looked at the correct code, which helped me to see where I went wrong when trying to complete the exercises.

Completing the first few lessons prior to class enabled me to follow Greg’s lecture more easily. As we looked at the JavaScript code of the slideshow sample, I was left wondering where exactly the console.log property comes into play. This is something that figured heavily into the Codecademy exercises, but I don’t recall seeing it come up during our in-class analysis of the example of JavaScript code. Is the console.log something that is specific only to Codecademy when printing the output to the screen, or does it have real-world applications?

I thought the lessons on JQuery were interesting, and I appreciate that there is an easier way to interact with elements in the DOM that does not require us to write such lengthy JavaScript code. I am dreading having to memorize the JQuery commands, as they are difficult to understand (I needed more hints during this lesson, too). I find it difficult to memorize and truly learn the concepts as I work through them on Codecademy, because referring back to an earlier concept requires hitting the back button and navigating away from your current page. I’ve started copying and pasting the entire lesson into a Google document so that I can refer to earlier parts of the lesson while working on the current module. My Google doc for the JavaScript and JQuery lessons 1-5 is 41 pages long.

I’m hoping that our June 14 class lecture will help me make more sense of the concepts I encountered in the Codecademy lessons. I look forward to applying these concepts through the slideshow exercise in the coming week.