Does anyone else find Javascript difficult to grasp?

Hi Alistair,

When I first tried my hand at learning JavaScript, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around how I would use the concepts. For me it wasn’t so much that I didn’t understand what a variable or a loop was, it was that I didn’t know if I would ever understand the logic behind a program well enough to implement those things in any practical way. Sure, I can use an if statement to determine whether to print one statement or another, but how does that translate to writing something like Angry Birds??? At least that was my thinking at the time.

The FSJS Techdegree helped with that, but what really helps is to actually start writing programs. Putting yourself in situations where you have to research to debug your code or someone else’s. That’s when things started to click a bit more for me. That’s when I started to gain some context for what it was that I was learning.

I’m not sure what’s causing you to get stuck, but if you stick with it and you code a little bit every day, it’ll get easier.

It was barely a year ago when I wrote my first piece of real code in JavaScript (not counting a few lines I copied from the web that I used to add a jquery plugin to a webpage I wrote years ago), and since then I’ve been asked to be a moderator here in the treehouse community, and I’m currently writing a web app that uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript (client side and server side) with Node.js, React and Express, and MongoDB/Mongoose.

Now I still have a long way to go (and I certainly don’t consider myself an expert), but I’m proof that it gets easier. So if you really have a passion for coding, don’t give up.

And if you ever need help, you can reach out to the community any time you’d like. There’s no shame in asking for help.