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Instructional Critique

Overall, my biggest regret in completing the steps for this course was a giant misunderstanding I had about them.  For some reason, I thought the tutorials were the focus of each step.  Looking back, I realize I should have focused on what I wanted to apply as a result of what I learned.  It would have been much better to identify what I needed to learn to make my site functional, read about those things, and then try them out on my site.

The best thing about using this method for learning is that I learned how to figure things out on my own.  There are times when I would hit a wall and needed help problem solving, but I feel like I have the resources I need to continue learning and growing as a programmer.

w3schools.com
I really liked the tutorials available on w3schools.  I was basically starting from scratch to create a website, and I felt like they suited my level really well.  They were straightforward and informative.  The examples weren't super effective in helping me practice, but were a great reference for the code I needed later on.  They also had a lot of great reference material, my personal favorite being the color picker.

tizag.com
I used tizag.com to learn MySQL since I didn't see a tutorial for it at w3schools.  It was okay, but not my favorite.  For one, there are ads in the middle of instruction which I found annoying.  For me, it wasn't as easy to follow as w3schools, either.

A note on learning MySQL: It was a bit of a struggle for me because I was using PHPMyAdmin to create my databases.  I didn't find any tutorials that taught how to use a site like that to create databases.  Instead, most of them teach you how to create them using code.  In the end, I used a combination of both approaches, but I wish I had realized that the tutorials wouldn't match up with what I needed.

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