Switched from watching tutorials to reading documentation and it clicked

I spent 3 months following YouTube tutorials for JavaScript and kept getting stuck when something slightly changed. Then last week I forced myself to read the MDN docs for array methods and finally understood why .map() works the way it does. Has anyone else found that tutorials hold your hand too much?

3 comments

3 Comments

susansingh10d ago

@max_brown nailed it, docs give you the real rules instead of someone's simplified version.

bennett.harper9d ago

Did you ever read the actual W3C spec for something like CSS specificity? I tried that once with selectors. Spent three hours reading about combinators and pseudo-classes. Got so lost in the grammar definitions I forgot what I was even trying to fix.

max_brown10d ago

Manuals and official docs clicked for me too after wasting time with tutorials. Specifically for CSS Flexbox and Grid I just sat down with the actual spec pages and MDN for about an afternoon. That was way better than watching someone build a layout while explaining it different than how it actually works under the hood. The fine print matters a lot when you're trying to figure out why something isn't aligning right.