Blog Post, TDK's Week 2: RTFM - tdkehoe/blog GitHub Wiki

This week we studied CSS, in particular CSS selectors and CSS positioning. On Wednesday we given two homework assignments. (Nested boxes, and recreating an HTML form.) I couldn't do either one. I wrestled for hours, trying to use the HTML4 positioning that I know, and completely failed.

Then I went home and read the positioning chapter in O'Reilly's CSS: The Missing Manual. I googled properties that didn't understand. Then I sat down and did each homework problem in half an hour.

On Friday we had two more homework problems (a CSS dropdown menu and recreating a blog post website). Again I had no idea how to do either. But instead of trying and failing I started googling and reading books. I ordered a new book from Amazon. This took Friday evening, Saturday evening, and all day Sunday. I wrote my blog posts about CSS positioning and CSS selectors. I wrote a blog post explaining how to make a CSS drop-down menu (even though I'd never made a drop-down menu).

Then I sat down and did the two homework problems. The drop-down menu would have taken half and hour, except that I made two stupid mistakes. I forgot to nest an element within its intended parent, and I discovered that when using panes in Atom you have to Save All, not just save one pane. With the stupid mistakes it took two hours. The second homework problem took several hours but was straightforward, without any major problems.

I learned to Read The F--- Manual before trying to do stuff that I don't know how to do.