My Top 10 Learning Methods For Self Taught Developers

In this video I want to discuss different ways of learning how to code and my experience with each one.
Sponsor: Freelancer Bundle (Use "brad25" for 25% off)
studywebdevelopment.com/freel...
💖 Become a Patron: Show support & get perks!
/ traversymedia
Website & Udemy Courses:
www.traversymedia.com
Follow Traversy Media:
/ traversymedia
/ traversymedia
/ traversymedia

[@Gigusx]

Least to most useful (this is individual to Brad) 1:15 Reading books 2:20 Audiobooks and podcasts 3:16 Written tutorials and blog posts 4:23 Structured e-courses / platforms 5:20 Other humans 6:30 Code examples 7:12 KZbin tutorials 9:20 Standalone courses 10:38 Documentation 11:40 Create your own projects

[@HostDotPromo]

Gigussx Appreciate you! 👍

[@GenerationSalaahudDeen]

Cheers!

[@austine2680]

Ty

[@albertchung7641]

I love you

[@maxima-4270]

Definitely googling, youtubing, githubing, following courses and later upgrading with my own project, docs. Also, I like to take concept definition tracking, "step by step" notes and feynman maps to see how everything fits together on a higher level.

[@Ath9493]

Brad is helping us to become a good web developer in so many ways..Thanks Brad.. Lots of respect

[@JLudwigCruz]

This is true. You have our respect Brad

[@nathanunderbsd5972]

Brad, count me in as your apprentice(self taught Developer(React/C#/Angular)). I thank you for your shares of knowledge.

[@aamir2k18]

True

[@marcosalbano]

True!

[@ferropede7400]

Тоже тру

[@TraversyMedia]

One method I completely forgot about is coding challenges. They are amazing for giving you that unscripted experience. I would love to hear what methods help you guys learn the most. Leave a comment letting us know

[@subratsingh6204]

I sometimes create notes or random snippets in a word file, so that I can refer it while coding. We just can't remember everything !

[@rhaeyx1076]

One resource would be your videos, but with more theoretical stuff I read books, if I am learning a new language I would watch videos but if I want to implement a specific something I usually go to blogs or watch videos but I'd skip most of it.

[@jamesmacharia1150]

Code examples are the best for me. I have learned a lot from your devconnector repo. Thank you so much. Could you make a video on managing media files with a service like cloudinary and intergrating that with a react or node restful api please ?? Thanks in advance....

[@ukraineSpaceman]

Good result for me gives direct work on the project. But I like to watch video courses.

[@Bayo106]

Im actually makong a website now that has all the best resources for self taught and other developers and desiners. It jas everything from inspiration to the best resources for each language and tutorials for css tools and links to good js and css tools.

[@JonathaOgunsola]

You might not know me...today i can say my php is great because i found you on youtube..i cant tell how much you have impacted my life positively. I now understand programming just as it should be not just as a programmer, your advice videos have really help me more most expecially most of the time when frustration want to set in also somany things about you have really encauraged me...going to two years now...that i bounced on programming as a self taught...am proud of my effort, am happy i found you, am greatful for your commitment and continuity and thanks and Glory to God for this moment and congrat on 700k sub

[@chrislee2673]

I have found your teaching methods to be second to none as for getting your feet wet in a new language. I do extend it with manuals to get a more complete list of methods available. But as a starting point where at the end of video. you have something tangible and a very clear idea of what you have working. Thanks Brad

[@developedbyed]

I find a mix of everything to work best for me. Congrats on 700k!

[@theemacsen1518]

Dev Ed I dig ur vids

[@muhammadmudassirsiddiqui3030]

Haw are you now?

[@mahfoudharous2397]

your channel is the best resource, for me, to learn and practice! thanks a lot Brad for all your love and work!

[@mawulijo]

I've always wondered whether I'm built for this especially anytime I take a code repo and can customize it or take inspiration from it. Now I know the ability to even do that makes me an advanced dev. Thanks brad

[@varunkhatri5705]

It's nearly a year since I started learning web development and seriously all these methods have helped a LOT in the journey!

[@demirkandogru]

Thanks to you I am now launching my first real project and I coded everything for it MYSELF! Even the server and the backend. You are a king!

[@nancysellars8780]

You are The Very Best!! Thank you for changing so many lives. Nancy in Houston.

[@CerealTuesday]

Great video and advice again Brad, thanks for sharing your learning ideas. Would love to see some videos of how you go about learning new tech - great idea.

[@dean6046]

Thank you man. Will continue to be a $10 / month patreon because you truly deserve it. I don't watch your videos every single day anymore, but still frequently every single week. You really helped me a lot over the years and I just want you to know how appreciated you are! Also was surprised that you mentioned John Sonmez's book. Great advice from both of you. PS I wouldn't mind more videos about stress/anxiety, self help stuff. If you're worried it will affect your main channel, you might want to create another channel where you just talk about mental health and stuff like that. You have a very interesting background/history and you can help a lot of people in that area too.

[@alipirzada9964]

Thanks for helping us out!!! Your Great! and congrats for the subscribers.

[@BrodieEaton]

That was conveniently uploaded. I subbed to you yesterday bc I wanted to learn how to develop websites. Thanks for the convenient timing for this video :D (By the way your HTML and CSS Crash courses helped SOOOO much)

[@teenytinytoons]

Starting my journey and you’ve been incredible with all this information.

[@cdw40]

Yes! Watching you learn a new subject in real time would be amazing!!

[@jeen_yuhs000]

Thank you for the information i finally bought my first course on udemy after watching your video. Now im going to hit a deep dive. Love your videos!🙌🏾

[@Carl-yu6uw]

Congratulations on the 700k subs Brad, well earned.

[@TraversyMedia]

Thank you :)

[@Flash-py6zy]

Thanks brad, you always have a great way of looking to things and that's why your energy is healthy and your content is fantastic. Can you link your slides in the description for the future? Sometimes i really like some notes on it, and the screenshots usually is a bad way of remembering things.

[@JuanDavid-fj3tg]

Brad , the idea you said at the end of the video , I actually think sounds interesting and encouraging (although it may be super messy), one of the everyday struggles of almost every programmer I think is the impostor sindrome, then I think seen someone as experience as you struggling with a topic, it helps to remember that we all struggle at times with programming topics , learning new concepts or solving bugs .

[@latelotus]

Yes, Brad! It would be awesome to see a vid of you working through something, especially if it involves reading documentation.

[@michaeljohn3688]

brad you are the best, you produce the best courses and you give the best advice. The world is lucky to have you. thanks a lot.

[@johnny2552]

Thanks so much for all your tutorials. Ive learned so much from you!

[@viallymboma9874]

Heyy Meeennn brad you're awesome...😎...thanks a bunch...when I look at your work I see someone who loves people...rather than someone who just wants to have a bigger community...your content is most of the time life changing and life saving content...there's so much love in that...

[@Dheemantha]

Thanks for sharing all of your experiences. Those make us more professionals day by day.

[@lardosian]

Without a doubt...build something. Use an interest you have as the subject. I'm big into football so I created a python flask quiz game. To get off the ground I followed another flask tutorial and then branched off on my own. I downloaded a json file of results for an entire season and stripped it down a bit, made python classes to generate the question/answer data, used mongo mlab to store player highscores (with help from Brad's tutorials), bootstrap for basic UI and put it up on Heroku. Made tons of mistakes along the way which drove me mad at times but learned a lot about OOP.

[@hart-coded]

Hey Brad really appreciate your videos they have been of immense help. You mentioned in this video that you have completed a number of paid course that helped to grow your own skill set. Would you be open to creating a short video on the course you found helpful. Im brand new to coding and after watching many courses and completing basic projects I have started to build my own portfolio of basic templates. I figured this would give me a solid understanding, flexility and more creative confidence. I've only completed the html & css templates so far. Im super thankful that you haven't forgotten us newbies as your courses are the only ones that actually give the end results. I would really appreciate more videos on what types of templates are important to have in our portfolio and how to build them so that we have good basic tools, knowledge and structure to draw from. Thanks again you really are so generous and impeccable in your delivery. A born teacher

[@houndokpaaristide7565]

This man having mind of helping developer is always his option.He is an opened minded and opened hearted man. Thank you sir.

[@ghazikerkeni7031]

Number 5 is one of the most important in my opinion, I learned coding by writting down other people's code even without understanding first but little by little as much code you write, it becomes yours

[@iwanwilaga]

"Tutorial Purgatory"...:) hm, i'm self-employed, learning online every day for 2-3 years now and this is the first time i hear this (official) term. World is big ;) THANK YOU for your invaluable materials, man! Greetings from Hungary

[@ronaldjohnson4470]

Great advice Brad. Tutorial purgatory has been one of my major problems, but I beginning to get more creative and develop my own projects. However, if I get stuck, I check tutorials for help. One more thing Brad, I find most documentation bloated and difficult to read and understand. However, I am going to take your advice and spend more time reading the documentation.

[@yifan5423]

Thanks. I like how you express ideas.

[@stars_pov]

What you mentioned near the end about making a series where you learn it as you make the video, I think that is a really really good idea.

[@maxd7228]

Open vsCode and break things, learn from the broken pieces, make it better is the method that works for me. I'll watch the relevant subjects that are interesting, but I quickly fall asleep to udemy tuts if I follow step by step, by breaking things is the method I've found that works best for me. Great Vid Brad.

[@stratman1234]

Great ideas. I've tried most of them and I can speak from experience that you've got it right. Oh, and I love the phrase 'tutorial purgatory'. LOL.

[@anwarnadaf8480]

Hey brad! Thanks for your valuable time for creating great content for us.

[@frixaco]

Yes, I'd really love to see you learning new technologies! Thank you for the video btw!

[@vherniellebis550]

Getting your hands dirty is still the #1 method for leaning programming in general. Thanks Brad. I also appreciate your new slides design.

[@rayli208]

Please do that "learning at your own pace" course. I wanna see how you learn from scratch and I'm sure a lot of others do too!

[@deepak8720]

I've Just started studying react and this is a great video to watch for anyone who's starting to learn something new. I planning to build some apps atleast 10 to get started. These apps are mostly simple ones and nothing completed.

[@gustavomarrara9660]

Awesome video Brad!! thanks for always share good content!!

[@prashamjain2476]

You are like an angel for the web developers. you rock man... God Bless you .. :)

[@BearAfterABear]

Thank you ! This was the motivation i needed ... cheers !

[@midgetechknowledge]

I am currently.learning laravel from your laravel from scratch tutorial. :)

[@paulkim5726]

Hi brad, i'm a huge fan of yours. becoming a web developer is a long journey but you make it easier for us to understand every single detail. looking forward for more tutorials.. my respect is yours. god bless..

[@ssarefintanweer6191]

Thanks Brad! you are the best mentor !

[@Webnoob]

Brad is the man. Thank you for your great content. That inspired me to start my own journey on youtube. I learned so much from you, thank you for motivation. please continue.

[@abhishekshah11]

Nice logo man

[@draebard1036]

I just notice that you just hit exactly 700k subs! Congrats Brad! Well deserved :)

[@gmanpublications]

You're right about college teaching theory. For most of my web development classes like JavaScript, Intro to Programming, and Advanced Programming we spent the majority of the time learning bits of code and not build anything. The design side wasn't any better either come to think of it. I for one would like to see you take something you don't know and record how you learn.

[@felixngositv7459]

This tutorial was soo good. It has changed my mindset.

[@vandanachaubey5418]

Congrats sir 700k subscribers...

[@vladimirjean]

Thanks, Brad, you're one of my mentors

[@user-vq6pe5px9k]

I watch the addvertisment without skipping and click on the side links just to help to Brad at least a little bit. Thank you for all the work you performed. Keep going. :D Interesting idea: I know you are a native English speaker, but as most of people watching you are not absolutely fluent mb it's worth to produce some kinda of top N tips to learn foreign language (english). I consider english being crucially important for programmer cuz it's impossible to consume relevant data and updates without it. Thaks for attention ;)

[@apingsample4720]

Congrats on 700k subs brad!

[@garnurikta3982]

Great video Brad! On your last item, one of the best ways to learn is teach something new to you. I have done similarly on a smaller level but it is enjoyable. Looking forward to this latest series, only cause you stole my idea. 😎 I keed, I keed

[@slycreator]

Thanks Brad..I have learn more stuff from you than my college teacher in computer science

[@AbhishekKumar-mq1tt]

Great mentor always come with great suggestion

[@birsingh5388]

Congrats for 700K, please keep doing great work 👍

[@TraversyMedia]

Bir Singh thanks 😊

[@christianjamesguevarra6257]

Trying to build something from scratch w/o framework or with little to no libraries is a great way of getting a better understanding of software systems that coders and end users use on a daily basis like web servers, web apps, etc

[@PatrickRams]

Thanks Brad,I needed this!!!👍👍👍

[@CloutGenie]

Amazing thanks for the advice!!!

[@mr.webdev3700]

Thanks Brad! Great Tips!

[@kantyDarius]

I am a absolute youtube freaky, following at least 15 or 20 yt channels, both english and spanish, there's a huge amount of great content just for free... Yt is a such a great community, I've learn a lot.. Also have 24 courses on udemy, some times i think I'm crazy haha but i love to learn... So many awesome technologies so much to do.

[@captainalpha4853]

You're just a GOLDEN man, Appreciate it Brad

[@tibielias]

What Brad said about expanding or starting a new Project that makes use of the foundations and techniques that you learned is important to solidify your knowledge in a subject. I want to mention something about structured courses that wasn't said here: Now, this happened to me many times when I tried to rush through a course. I missed code lines here and there as I tried to copy them from the videos. This always lead to more obvious run-time errors and bugs that I had to fix in order to progress from one section to the other. In other cases the course became so old that the code just simply didn't work or the code had bugs that were uncovered later by other students or in a more unfortunate case, these bugs were never fixed. It is definitely a good idea to learn how to debug, read forums, talk to people and dive into the documentation when you run into issues like these. This way you can get a lot more out of a course. Learning how to fix code, documenting and discussing what didn't work and how it was fixed is something that is very close to real life development problems.

[@Tony-ee3nm]

Great information, thanks a lot Brad

[@ksubyslowed]

🤔 I am highly convinced that people get enjoyment from disliking videos. What is there to dislike about this

[@realDominik586]

some people dislike videos for not being perfect. one thing bothers them and they can't stand it. anyway we should be thankful for even imperfect videos

[@techdev1968]

Cant understand those kind of people.

[@navturn]

Thank you for this great video. Agree with everything but just have 2 remarks. Official documentations can sometimes be very difficult to understand so i'm not always sure it's one of the best choice for beginners. About the online courses (Udemy...) and own project. I personally prefer to start my own project at the same time i'm following a course. If I wait for the end of the course i forgot a lot of things from the course so i can struggling a lot more plus working on my own project at the same time makes me easy to realize where are my weak points or what i didn't really understand in the course (often we think we understood but we are wrong....) often the projects in the courses are not enough and i have to repeat things multiples times to keep them in my mind. So course projects + own project at the same time works better for me.

[@glensrb4723]

I like the video series idea where you learn something new. I would watch! :)

[@_rushikesh_ganesh]

Nice talk it's really helpful for beginner

[@rumblebeast08]

Brad, any thoughts on Agile development? Beyond learning how to code, I believe it would be really helpful to teach how to develop in a project setting, even with a team collaboration. Any advice or perhaps a video outlining this?

[@XbattlepopeX]

Coding challenges are fun and make you learn alot, was doing a calculator in react from FCC, and surprising part was calculator part was somewhat easy, but figuring out how to prevent user stupidity was way harder, like allowing only one decimal point per number.

[@katkovdify]

Brad, do you have a video about how you make your tutorials? What equipment (microphone, etc.) and what software (capturing screen, editing, etc.) you use?

[@f1ncc246]

Apparently first viewer 😁 and thank you, you do a nice job.

[@ishanajmeri3275]

it's very helpful .thanks man.!!!

[@patrickfitzgerald5570]

Keep up the good work. Thank you Brad

[@draakisback]

Hmm. Yeah that seems about right. I am a KZbinr and I do educational programming content and yeah, I learn most of my stuff via documentation and practical work but finding a good KZbin video or standalone course definitely helps with the finer points. To me documentation is King and it's surprising how many of my subs don't understand this. Often I get questions that can be anwsered with a simple Google search. As they say, us programmers are the best searchers in the world and I truly believe that. Another thing that I think should be number one (or at least is number one for me) is teaching. When I teach programming to my subs or to coworkers, I often find myself learning many concepts that I might have overlooked or had a somewhat simplistic grasp on. I teach all kinds of technologies since I use many of them in my day to day; flutter/dart, elixir, go, f#, Kotlin, clojure etc. With elixir especially, even though I had worked on a fairly large system before making my courses on KZbin, I still found that I was able to learn the language and ecosystem better by teaching it than by working with it.

[@alexmitchell9277]

Reading a book by Mark Myers on JavaScript (with exercises to do online) and jointly doing 2 of your Udemy courses on HTML/CSS and JavaScript with a view to completing the projects and then from there making my own website. I understand that will be the real learning process when I do that. I am stuck in a loop of learning tutorials and books since last summer. I took a break admittedly for a few months and resumed my studies in late January/ early February. I have taken onboard your advice today.

[@coced]

A Mind For Numbers Amazing book for the learning process itself

[@maxkazionov2029]

or coursera course "Learning how to learn"

[@ananddarshan1114]

You are a real inspiration to me, I too want be a self taught developer without wasting my parent's money, just like you so I thank you a lot for that.

[@jamesmacharia1150]

Code examples are the best for me. I have learned a lot from your devconnector repo. Thank you so much. Could you make a video on managing media files with a service like cloudinary and intergrating that with a react or node restful api please ?? Thanks in advance....

[@shomendrapradhan9558]

Thank you for such a wonderful video. You are awesome👍

[@CoderFoundry]

10:44 agreed! For example, Microsoft's official documentation for .NET and Visual Studio is top notch, and easy to follow. However, they don't promote it well, so beginners don't realize they should start there first.

[@MogalMauli]

Hello sir , I'm doing the bug detector project you told about. Thank you very much for the advice.

[@taariqq]

There were quite a few resources in there that I did not know. Thanks chief.

[@cutiel2692]

Coding phase is Real too his ramblings and informal way helps a lot as well as Wes Bos. He started podcasts lately

[@wasiquehaider4727]

Thanks alot Brad for this info ♥

[@lucasbertoldo5062]

Thanks Brad! You're the best

[@AK-Star007]

i am doing five out of suggested method 1 websites for articles 2 youtube 3 example codes 4 creating my own projects 5 udemy JS course of Brad and bob tabor for c# i have made a lot of progress. i have finance background

[@brootalbap]

thanks for your insights!

[@vittoriodeluca5233]

Brad, Thanks for your videos I am learning a lot from them. I wanted to ask if you recommend any computer science book as a must read? Which are the computer science books that have helped you the most? You deserve all your success

[@mrMinstrel]

Thanks Brad...and yes, lead us as you blindly tip-toe into uncharted waters. That would be a great adventure for all of us!

[@viallymboma9874]

One method that helps me a lot is after watching 2 or 3 tutorial on the same topic but each done in their own ways, I decided to dirty my hands and combined the 3 ways of those tutorial and build my own project of them...that way I learn to merge things and to see what works with what...😎

[@FunIsGoingOn]

Omg, you silently reached 700k subs, congrats. At 4:00 I accidentally understood "they would turn into ebooks, there is just not enough rum" ;)

[@mohammedmerajpasha418]

your videos are too good that love watch them.

[@amar2042]

Thank you I actually agree with your view

[@kerryd2060]

Thanks Brad. I'm counting on you to help me become a website developer. I have your Udemy courses and they are great!

[@monome3038]

Thank you so much Brad 🙏

[@ved9840]

thanks for the video... really a motivating one.. 😄😄

[@daniellaerachannel]

wow! greatest video ever! thanks Brad