julia_miller24•5d agoProlific Poster

That bootcamp grad told me I was learning wrong - here's what I think

I was at a meetup last Thursday and this guy who finished a 12 week coding bootcamp kept telling everyone to skip the basics and just build stuff. He said learning Python fundamentals first is a waste of time. I've been self teaching for about 8 months now and I actually disagree pretty hard. How are you supposed to build anything solid if you don't understand how loops, conditionals, and functions actually work under the hood? Has anyone else here tried jumping straight into projects without the basics and actually made it work?

2 comments

2 Comments

anthonymurray4d agoTop Commenter

First time I tried skipping basics and jumping into a project I spent three hours trying to figure out why my simple calculator app kept crashing. Turns out I didn't understand that strings and integers are different things. That was a rough Tuesday night. Building stuff is great and all but if you can't read a traceback without googling every other word you're just gonna burn out fast. Bootcamp guy probably learned on a tight deadline but that doesn't mean the rest of us should skip the map reading on a road trip.

gavina734d ago

Is there a middle ground where you learn just enough to not feel completely lost and then start building? I've been at this for about a year and a half and the projects that actually stuck for me were the ones where I had to look up things I didn't know yet, but I had enough basics to know what to even search for. If you don't understand that strings aren't numbers, you won't even know why your code broke, and that's the part that really slows you down.