PSA: That "learning HTML in a week" course set me back 3 months

I signed up for a popular bootcamp that promised I'd build a full website in 7 days, but by day 4 I was copy-pasting code I didn't understand from Stack Overflow. The instructor breezed through CSS specificity and never explained why my flexbox was breaking, so I spent the next 12 weeks unlearning bad habits from that rushed curriculum. Has anyone else found that slow, repetitive tutorials beat those fast-track courses for actually remembering stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

gibson.mark5d ago

Learning HTML in a week" is the biggest lie in tech education. Real understanding takes time and repetition, not rushing through material. I started with a slow, old-school book and worked through each chapter until I could actually build things without copying code. That approach took months but I never had to unlearn anything later.

terry_barnes4d ago

Big time. Tried one of those "HTML in 3 days" video series and ended up completely lost when my navbar wouldn't center. The guy just said "use flexbox" and moved on, then I spent two weeks trying to fix horizontal scrolling on the site I built from his template. Finally ditched all that and went through a free course that made me type out every single tag by hand for a month. Now I can actually look at a broken layout and know why it's broken instead of just guessing. Slow and boring beats fast and useless every single time.