How To Learn CSS

I took AP Computer Science and learned HTML and CSS from high school, so coding for last semester’s creative coding was not that much of a problem for me. But still, while I enjoyed coding with HTML and CSS, creating satisfactory websites, I still make minor mistakes. Especially when I start coding a website and get back to it after a few days later, I get confused because I forget the id and class names I assigned. So in this reading, the three skills I discovered to be important are the essentials of CSS: Language Fundamentals, Inheritance and the Cascade, and Responsive Design.

For the first skills of learning, the Language Fundamentals, though I am not sure if this is categorized as a skill in the reading, I found this to be the most important aspect in coding. Nowadays, with Google by our side, we can just look up information online and find the codes that do what we want. While my creating professor said, “Knowing how to search on Google is the fundamentals of Computer Programming”, searching is only helpful under the assumption that we understand the basic structure of the language. Like is said on the reading, “It really is worth dedicating some time to making sure you understand these things, as it will save you a lot of time and frustration in the long run,” all of the searchings will not make sense unless you know what you are looking at. And if someone does not know the language, that person would not even know how to search from the beginning. So every time, when I learn something new, I always ensure I know the fundamentals clearly and I try to remind myself constantly so that as a person I can progress.

Another skill I consider to be important is Inheritance and the Cascade. As I said above, I tend to forget the id and class I have assigned to HTML tags. This is terrible because I find myself overriding and overriding tags for unnecessary reasons. Efficiency is the most important aspect of all programming languages. Everything you write down contributes to the file’s megabytes and the more the code gets messy, the slower your website becomes. Onetime, I was coding a website for my creative computing class that had a lot of buttons. The buttons all had the same structure but only different sizes depending on where it was placed. When I could have effectively organized the CSS property, I think I assigned weird names for the buttons and everything got so messy that I had to keep overriding the same thing. And it wasn’t just the buttons, the CSS for everything else on the website could have been written more concisely. So it is really important to have the concept of inheritance and selectors in mind so that you can have a clear structure to your CSS file.

Lastly, being in the 21st century, where you can see a website from different devices with different resolution, it is essential to have your website to be responsive. This is the one skill in the reading that I am still not familiar, but think to be the most important aspect of coding a website. I think it is easy to make things look good in one resolution, however, having it l ook equally good in other devices is hard. So I am still in the process of understanding to code a responsive website so that, as I said above to fully understand when I see other examples of responsive websites.