What did I learn and Why is it Important?
Although the exams were a bit challenging for me, overall, this class has taught me a lot of skills relevant to my target industry. Up until this point, I learned 4 different programming languages that are used everyday in the web development world. Not only did this course teach my how to write code, the course taught me how to think in code, if that makes sense. I mentioned this in Learning Artifact 2, where professor Crowley told us that, "You can teach people to write code, but you can't teach people how to code". This is very true because when it comes to learning new code, you have to be able to understand how different lines of codes manipulate a web-page or application. What makes this skill important is that there are many, many more programming languages out there and in order for someone to be marketable or get hired easily, we need to show that we are capable of adapting to learning new languages and changes to current languages. This course also taught me that reading a book on a programming language is not enough. You have to actually get behind a keyboard and start typing up the code yourself in order to have it stick.
Learning Techniques That Worked Best For Me
Other than MySQL, Codecademy was definitely my favorite medium to learning all the coding languages required for the course. I hate to beat the dead horse here, but Codecademy makes coding easy and fun to learn. I could tell that Codecademy did their research on what content to put into a course because each section that I completed, was a precursor to the next section thus getting more comfortable. At first, each module seemed intimidating. I honestly thought that I was going to be clueless and not be able to get the assignments done. What got me through each module was my (sorry for my language) "screw it" type attitude and just diving right in into the modules. This and repetition was definitely the most important learning technique for me. This is something that I learned in the Marines as an infantry rifleman, we train, train, and train until we get it right. Before going into a hostile building to clear it out, thinking about who may be in there or what type of advantages the enemy might have on me, at that point, it is irrelevant; what is important is the mission which is to clear the building of all hostile enemies. For this course, each module was my mission.
If More Time Was Available....
If there was more time for this course, I definitely would have learned more on HTML/CSS. I would have loved to learn how to make my website insanely crazy looking like we see on well developed websites. I refrained from taking beautiful templates off of the internet for my website because it would not have been genuine to me. I'm proud of what I created because the only thing I took was from the CSS Liquid Layout template, which was not all that pretty. I had to think of my own ways to deliver the message as well as making my website visually appealing. The website took a lot of time, sweat, and tears to figure out how the file directory worked, how to call those file directories so that my page would display correctly, and most importantly, have my website satisfy assignment requirements.
