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Another tip from me... Download Visual Studio Code from Microsoft. It's free and a lot more helpful when it comes to telling you what might have gone wrong with your code. Also it is a VERY steep learning curve. I'm revisiting this bit to wrap my head around classes and how the semantics applied have differences and different meanings. Personally, I've had almost exactly the same experience as you describe and worked at it for more than a year in my time off. My single best piece of advice, when it comes to distance learning is: NEVER just "fly by" the lessons if you have even a slightly raised eyebrow when finishing the lesson. That's been my biggest mistake. If you are just a little bit in doubt as to what is going on and why, restart that whole segment and do it over. Also search for questions about the same topics on stackedoverflow (and don't just roll with the first answer - read the discussions and other replies. Other peoples mistakes and the discussions are a good way to learn).

Finally. Take a break. Take a day or three off and come back... Before you wear yourself down.

Best regards,

Coding is hard and the diffrence about who can become a programmer and someone who cannot is that the former will never give up.

When you think about aquiring new abstract skills it is comparable to becomming a heavy weight lifter. You do not simply wake up one morning 3 weeks after start with the nessesary strenght to become the world champion, it takes minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years to train your muscles to train your body to aquired the nessesary strenght. Learning abstract mental skills works in a similar manner.

Train your brain for as long as you can every day even if it means 30 minutes or 2 hours and eventually you will start seeing the patterns and logic.

Programming is alot like logical problem solving and a tip for beeing a better problem solver is when you are confused:

1. Start from the beginning and make sure you understand the Question/Task
2. Make sure you understand what you dont understand, asking/googling the right question is key
3. Do research, Google is a good start
4. Refresh the basics. Take other courses that start from the beginning(even if it feels like a waste of time becus you already have taken a course on the subject matter) this is just a feeling and is almost never the case. More often then not you think you understand a concept just to discover you realy dont.

Often people take pride in their mental ability and this has a negative effect in problem solving becuse when your are supposed to think about the problem and the steps in the problem you are actually focusing on your feelings regarding your mental abilitys and your future prospects. It is almost impossible to solve a problem while focusing on your feelings, when you are solving a problem. There is time in life to think about your feelings and this is not when you are solving a problem.

Sorry for the language in my text. English is my second language and im not good at writing in my native languange. This text is a summary of my own learning experience, I am not a "fast" learner but i am a persistent learner and i do not envy fast learners because i have made learning fun and exciting by accepting the challanges instead of despiting them.

I learned OOP in JavaScript and Python so I knew the concepts of what is going to be thrown at me here. But after watching this C# Objects course I knew that if someone just started learning programming with C# on Treehouse he/she will have troubles. For example the whole notion of functions/methods is not even introduced here. Accessing properties with dot notation is explained only lightly. I was lucky that I came from other languages but oh boy.

Hi Weston,

Please hang in there, you are not alone i get like that as well and I think i speak for all developers when i say "we all run into the same problem of not understanding something/Code". Trust me it will work itself out, stay dedicated and "don't give up ". If you ever need help email me logicdefense@icloud.com. Weston Mcnamara. Also remember this quote: "if you stay persistent it will come to you, and if you stay consistent it will stay with you". Hope this helps....

Thank's God I can see I'm not the only one ... Don't get me wrong but I feel so tired after a one lesson of this course. The teacher jumped from creating a variables to making a video game ,this is not a good idea when you have to deal with noobies ... I finished couple diffrent courses with other teachers and every lesson brought me something new and the way that been presented just makes me jump to my own projects right after the lesson. No offence but in this case after every lesson I had to watch YT where all those things been explained in more understanable way ... Please TREEHOUSE make a refresh of C# track with different teacher. No heart feeling, but this is the first time from a 4 month's that I can feel frustration when I open Treehouse ...

I agree partly with a lot of the people who are having a hard time understanding. (incoming long post..side note, im still learning C# and just finished the objects section and don't understand a lot...work in progress!)

There are a couple of things I have noticed while taking this course:

1. It's not easy. - this is my second time on treehouse (last time i did Java, this time I decided to go with C#) The basics section is...basic, but still requires a lot of attention and learning. I think the overall idea is that you are not going to watch a video once and suddenly become a developer or programmer. The video is literally 15% of the learning process.

example: If you have no idea what vehicles are -never seen them, heard of them, used them - and someone says "This is a car. There are many functions to a car, and a lot you can do with it." You aren't going to suddenly know how it works, what an oil change is, what a V6 engine versus a V4 engine is. (is that a thing? see i don't even know) It requires you to put continual effort in. Drive it over and over, read the instruction manual to see how things work, talk to your friends (or treehouse community) if you have issues...see what I'm getting at?

2 Motivation and Persistence - I know what it's like to quit, and say you don't understand. But then again, last time i quit i was in the state of "I just don't get this...too much math, i'll never understand it..." One thing you need to do is surround yourself with motivation but answer the right questions...WHY do I want to learn this? WHAT is my end goal here?

If you say your goal would be "I want to become a mobile app developer, or make games in unity" then you need to let that passion drive you. What are you willing to give up to achieve that goal? We get caught up in how we havn't met our goal when the process of getting to the goal is WAY more important than the goal itself...

thats my small rant...:P

tl;dr - Work Hard. Make Friends. Get Motivated. Value the process and adventure of getting to your goal.

Plus the fact after one hour of trying understand a constructor in this course, I checked the YT and got better explanation in couple of minutes ... So

if (betterContentOnYT == true){ stopWastingMoney(); }else { continue; }

Hi Weston.

I inspect the video that are linked to your question. You are totally right, the 99% of video time, the code are contains compilers error.

To avoid such embarrassing\misleading moments, you can read the forum topics before you are copying the code from video. Most of the times, if the video contains errors, you can see it by reading the topics.

Apparently the code debugging is a huge part of real life job, so just "Just smile and wave, boys. Smile and wave." ;)

Regards, Avram.

Do you need help from the staff, or other students?

The forum is a great place to get help from other students, but may not be the most expedient (or even certain) way to contact the staff.

The recommended way to reach the staff is described on the Support page.

But if you'd like help with specific issues from fellow students (such as myself), post your questions here. And to facilitate the most complete and accurate responses to each question, be sure to show the code you've written (or post a snapshot of your workspace), and also include a link to the course page you are working with.

Hey Weston Mcnamara!

Im in the exact boat as you, so I understand everything you're going through. As I am a beginner I don't have any help full advices, I just wanted to let you know that you're not alone!

I see that your post here was some time ago and I hope that you didn't give up and that today you're feeling more comfortable with C#.

Cheers from Sweden, Patric

YT = Youtube

Hey Weston,

I'm sorry that everything seems so confusing right now. Those times are definitely going to come when it comes to programming; I get like that at least every other day!

The best things I can tell you is to maybe keep reviewing the videos and redo the challenges, NEVER hesitate to ask questions on here if something doesn't make sense or you just want a different explanation on a topic to help it make more sense, and feel free to google around. There are a ton of blogs and tutorials out there with different ways of explaining these topics, so one of them just may click. The best thing, though, is to keep at it and keep practicing. :)

Hi, Steven Parker

This was a quote I saw on Instagram, and has been good for me when I feel like how Weston Mcnamara did.

Thank you,

I'm sorry to hear this. Don't worry, I've had to take the TreehouseDefense course twice to solidify my understandings of C#. I would suggest taking notes in Microsoft Word with pictures and examples and type down any key terms and explanations of how to program in C#. For me, it was using dot notation like: point.DistanceTo -- I couldn't wrap it all in my head. And it was also the passing of parameters like you said Point point. These are just my suggestions. Take a look at Static and Instance methods and learn how parameters are passed from one class to the other. Hope this helps!

This forum helped me. I was feeling the same way. This section is difficult. I learned that it is more about learning how YOU learn than how something is taught. I figured out a way for the information to click to me.

1. I have a OneNote notebook for each language.
2. I have a page in that notebook for each section (C# Objects Methods or C# Objects OOP etc.)
3. I go to the end of the section and screenshot the code and put it in that page
4. Make notes and arrows to key points defining what those lines mean and how the apply, with a section on the side for information not directly in the code a. note: some code is delete or modified during the course, I add a screen shot of that sections before and after
5. Create another page in OneNote just for the quizzes of that section (Just started doing this today. Works Great!)
6. In the quiz page, I put the question and the answer and add notes
7. After completing a section, I go through all of the quizzes again until I know I understand the concepts don't have to look at my notes because it makes sense.

I plan on adding another step to my studies further on where I print the final code after 3 or 4 sections and notate what they are without looking at my notes. For me, it is hard to code things up when I am lost or frustrated so practicing with an error checker (the quizzes) helps me understand the concepts so when I do practice without a net I can have a foundational understanding.

I hope this helps!

I typically learn by using many different resources since I know I'm going to get stuck using just one. When you learn from one resource you can circle back on another topic you've found yourself stuck on.

I think it would be unrealistic for a beginner to understand this so yeah I would not recommend this course to a beginner C# is complicated and most people, I feel, only come here after having learned the basics like Javascript. Also having to code on the workspace makes things way more difficult than they have to I would rather use visual studio code which is better at marking errors. Since I'm not a complete beginner I'm able to understand but the workspace really is a nightmare.

For any other fellow C# beginners I would recommend using Snagit from Techsmith. Lets you take screenshots of difficult prosesses and highlight bits thats really important for the code. Snagit together with OneNote has been a great tool for my learning prosesses with programming.