Hi all, today I have completed the CSS course as a Codeademy pro member. I am an experienced creative designer by trade but i’m looking to learn some front end development to develop my range of skills and appreciation for all things that go into creating digital content (plus I’d like to teach my two young children in time too…let’s face it, coding isn’t going away anytime soon). I found the course to be quite challenging but rewarding. So, any advice where I go from here as I still feel like I haven’t grasped how to put everything together yet i.e. it’s quite hard?
Mastering CSS is not something one can do in a few weeks, or even months. It takes most people years to really build a foundation of techniques and ways to overcome challenges. When you no longer have to wrestle with it, you know you are getting somewhere.
Because of the Living Standard approach being taken with HTML/CSS and ECMAScript the API’s will continue to evolve. Intimate familiarity with the existing recommendations makes it much easier to understand and adopt new ones as they emerge.
For extra study, find some JavaScript visual effects and attempt to emulate them using only CSS. You’ll be amazed by how much we can do without script. In fact I recommend to every author that their pages should not depend upon script to give the user a good experience. Yes, script is a necessity, but it does not need to be applied to visual aspects as much as we might think.
Only when we go down that road with some serious intentions do we begin to learn the trade-offs, and where script has advantage over CSS (or the reverse). With the increase in power and speed of modern devices there may be less of a concern either way, but one should be able to reason things out and that takes experience. Lots and lots of experience.
