Selecting selectors, selectively...
Things I've worked on/completed since my last post…
Although I had less free time than I had hoped to study this week, I managed to cover the following areas in the Intermediate HTML & CSS in The Odin Project:
Advanced selectors
Positioning
CSS Functions
Custom Properties
Things that went well...
Although I was unable to study a couple of days this week for reasons beyond my control, I am still happy that have almost finished the Intermediate CSS Concepts section.
Things didn't go quite so well…
I am not working on any practical projects at the moment (just reading theory), but I had to re-read/go through some sections more than once to 'get things into my head'.
This is not a bad thing per se and maybe just something I need to adapt to. This is also a pattern when it comes to going through reading material, so I was expecting it.
As part of Advanced Selectors, I had to complete CSS Diner. I got stuck a lot when going through this and needed some help more than once. This also showed me that I had not understood some of the reading material properly and also, that I had somehow fundamentally misunderstood some basic selectors! An example of this would be, say, writing a selector as 'div:first-child' instead of 'p:first-child' (where div was the parent). I previously had it in my mind that child selector had to work in conjunction with the parent (this must have seemed logical to me and so my brain continued to see it this way).
I was relieved to see in The Odin Project forums that other people had also made this same mistake (presumably for the same reasons).
In any case, upon realising that I did not understand this as well as I probably should, I went over the chapter again and re-did CSS diner (also paying more attention to the prompts in CSS Diner this time). I found the exercise a lot easier the second time around and definitely 'got it' better after going through it a second time.
Things I've learnt/things I need to improve on…
Although I re-did the section on Advanced Selectors, I saw that this area can be a bit 'tricky' and so it would not do any harm for me to practise this a bit more, although I think my understanding definitely improved after going over the material a second time.
I had heard a lot of devs mention that they 'pick and choose' the parts of the docs they read as they need them, which makes perfect sense. However, as I am supposed to be following the course as prescribed, I want to read everything that I need to and of course, at this point, there is the 'fear' of failing to read something of crucial importance. I do hope that I can be more selective in terms of what I read going forward though, in order to work faster and more efficiently.
Plan for the forthcoming week…
I would love to get the Sign-up Form project finished, but if I can at least get it started by this time next week, I will be happy with that.