Hello. I am my team’s only coach/mentor and I want to improve my programming skills. My training so far has come from GitHub and YouTube videos lol. I want to understand when I get an error in Visual Studio Code, and I click on the suggested fixes (the lightbulb), how would I know if I need to create a class, create a type, create an enum, create a constructor, etc. My team’s programmer and I just click on stuff until it works, but we would like to get a better understanding of this.
Along with that, are there any recommendations on which free online programming courses are best to learn java?
The docs here have some good resources to check out for this. I personally learned from Codecademy, but FreeCodeCamp and the others linked on that page are good too. Once you have a better understanding of what each function of the language does (what a class is, what a object is, etc etc) everything fits together a bit better. Remember that code is just a collection of tools to describe to a computer what you want it to do. For more FRC-specific resources after you have understood the language, take a look through the Command-Based tutorials.
Others’ posts on more formal Java training are fine and I’ll give a general learning tip professional instructors usually use. Certainly address the error message and use it to help direct you to the solution but type out the correct code yourself. Do not click on the suggestions - you don’t learn as well or as quickly and sometimes the wrong answer is selected.
The only suggestion I click on is I’m lazy about typing import so I very carefully read the suggestions and knowing the right answer that I could have typed, I’ll carefully click on that one suggestion I deem correct.