Hi guys and welcome to the course. Now after thousands of students have taken this course I've compiled
some of the top tips from the most successful students to help you make the most of your time on the
course.
So I know what I do with instruction manuals when I receive them.
But this is not it.
Because I want to share with you some of the most useful tips that will help you learn to code and get
the most out of the course.
So first tip is as you go from lesson to lesson in the course you'll find that each of the lessons should
take about 10 minutes long.
And this is something that we intentionally designed for the course.
Now a lot of students, when they're watching video tutorials online very often what people do, is they'll
watch the video and type along to the code.
And this is what we tend to call code along.
So the tutorial types a bit. You type a bit. You try to keep up with the pace of the tutorial or you pause
the video every so often to catch up. But essentially you're coding along with the instructor.
And this is probably one of the most intuitive ways for people to learn from online tutorials.
Now in order for you to be more successful than most people. What I would recommend is: instead to watch
the video tutorials, which are usually as I said about 10 minutes long.
If it's a 20 minute or a 50-minute tutorial then stop it and around the 10-minute mark And while you're
watching it, instead of spending time trying to frantically type out the code, I want you instead to just
try and understand what's going on. Why the code is being written and understand the purpose of the code
rather than trying to type along at the same pace.
Now once you've understood what those 10 minutes are about; what the tutorial is trying to teach you
then to go to your computer and type out the code and try to replicate what happened in the 10 minutes.
Now the reason why this helps people learn so much better is because, instead of just copying code by
rote, which doesn't teach you anything.
Instead, it forces you to really understand what's going on and absorb the content and then test yourself
afterwards to see if you really understood.
So this is my number one top tip.
And it's important to remember that we are learning programming. We're not learning how to type fast. It
doesn't help you become a better programmer by just copying out code as fast as you can.
If you wanted to practice your typing and to speed up your typing skills then I recommend something
like keybr.com where you can focus on that specific skill to improve your speed of typing.
But what we're going to focus on in the course is learning programming.
So we're going to keep our eye on the prize.
Now while you're listening to the videos and you're understanding what's going on, I recommend taking
a few notes for yourself to come back to or review in the future.
And this is especially useful after when those 10 minutes are up and you're trying to remember one of
those bits of code that you had to type and what was the theory that was covered.
So one of my favorite note-taking systems is something called Cornell notes. And it's very very simple.
It just splits a single note page into 4 sections. At the top, you have the topic of what the notes are
about. And then you have the section of notes where you would write down the majority of your notes.
Now after you write a few lines it's recommended that you go and review those notes and pick out the
most important keywords or questions that you're asking yourself that you want to research on later
or any sort of hints or reminders to yourself.
And finally once you've completed the lesson then you go to the summary section and you summarize what
the entire lesson was about in a few bullet points.
So I've created a downloadable PDF of this note-taking system.
So if you're keen to try it out, go ahead and download it from the course resources section and you can
print it out into a notebook or just on a few loose sheets if you want to try it out.
Now the next thing to remember is that if I'm talking too fast or too slow you can always change the
playback speed.
Now if you're in a lesson that you find particularly easy to understand and you already know most of
the concepts, then go ahead and switch the video player to double speed so that you can cover much more
ground in the same space of time.
Now on the other hand if I'm talking too fast or if English is not your first language then feel free
to change the speed to half-speed, so that I talk a lot slower and you can take up the information
more readily.
But it's important that you try to not skip any of the tutorials on any of the modules.
And the reason is that the curriculum was carefully designed so that it would be a smooth sloping
ramp so that you start out at the beginning and you slowly make your way through more and more difficult
concepts.
Now if you skip a couple of modules then it makes it really, really hard for you to catch up and to understand
what's going on, which is the most important thing.
However some of the videos I will label with optional or skippable and in that case feel free to skip
those lessons if they don't interest you.
Now the next thing to remember is that if you find at any point the tutorials become harder and they
inevitably will be they're designed to get harder and harder.
But if you find that it's a little bit too difficult, then I recommend just bookmarking it.
Making a note of which module you really struggled with and trying to use that method of watching the
videos for 10 minutes, reviewing what has been taught, trying to replicate the code yourself.
But if you're still stuck and you really don't understand what's going on then that might be something
that you have to come back to.
So I find that usually with programming concepts it helps to try it out, read around the topic, and then
come back to it after a week or so. And very often
what was very very difficult the first time you come across it, after you've done it a few times, after you've
researched around the topic and then you come back to it, it becomes a lot easier.
So remember to mark things for review that you don't understand.
Now recently I went to learn windsurfing in Mykonos. And it's a skill that I've never had before.
It's something that I found incredibly challenging. And I fell on my face during the entire lesson pretty
much and it hurt a lot.
I got battered and bruised. And my ego got bruised a lot as well. But this is exactly what it's like when
you try to learn a new skill so it's important that you persevere and continue to put in the hours to
practice and to try and try again. Because you can learn something very superficially just by watching
a video or you know trying it for a few hours. But in order to master a skill, the most important thing
is practice.
Now the final thing is that I will say it now you will get stuck at some point because everybody does
And in fact, I wish that Hollywood would stop making movies where programmers are just typing away, like
some sort of frenzied hacker person. Because most of the programmers I know who actually do this as a
job, they spend probably 90% of their time just staring at the screen trying to figure out what
is wrong.
Why is it not working?
So getting stuck is very much a universal part of programming; something that you have to come to even
love and enjoy.
So when you do find yourself stuck, I want you to imagine that you're already a fully-fledged developer,
working a job where somebody is paying you to do this for them, because you're the professional.
So I want you to use the tools that professional programmers use when they get stuck. And that is Google
and Stack Overflow.
Try to figure it out. Try to see: what did other people do?
Because 99% of the time, you won't be the first person who's come across that problem.
It's very likely that somebody has experienced that before and other people have helped them to solve
that problem or help them understand what it is they're stuck on. And the thing to remember is that struggling
is good. In that moment when you finally spot that typo or finally figure out why it is that your code
isn't working and you fix it.
That is one of the best feelings in the world. So struggle is good. And it really is through the struggles
that you actually improve and level up your skills.
So I'm so excited to be on this journey with you and I look forward to all of your success in the future!