My high school physics teacher always told his students that you shouldn’t worry if you didn’t understand what he was teaching right away, just keep at it and one day you’ll have that moment where BANG!, everything makes sense and how you see the world will change. Having that “ah-ha!” moment and having a greater understanding HTML/CSS, PHP, or ActionScript or any other web language won’t change how you see the world, but it will change your understanding of the Internet and suddenly everything you build will be more efficient and streamlined.
For me, it’s been different for everything I’ve tried to learn. For HTML/CSS I never had an moment where I just got it, I lucked out and understood what was going on right away. It’s one of those things where I have trouble talking about it and explaining it to people because I’ve never really had to think things through in a way that I would be able to communicate to others. ActionScript, on the other hand, is something I’ve had to put a lot of time into and while I found the beginning stuff not too difficult, when trying to move from simple stuff up to the more interesting and complicated, I found it a struggle sometimes to wrap my heads around some concepts. So what did I do? I kept at it. I looked at as many sources as I could to learn. I bought books by different authors, did as many tutorials as I could, because sometimes things aren’t explained in a way the I really understood. But then, every time I built something, whether for work or just for fun, I learned a little more. And along the way I had a series of small “ah-ha” moments that eventually lead to me being able to build things faster and with more efficient code.
I don’t believe you can force one of these moments but you can set yourself up to have one. A lot of the time when I figure things out, I have them when I’m no where near a computer. I’ll have them when I’m walking to work, thinking about what I’m working on and what I’m going to try to do that day. Sometimes I do a tutorial and one little part of it helps me realize the solution to something that’s been bugging me for weeks.
But beware, that “ah-ha” moment might never come. Sometimes your brain just isn’t wired to figure some stuff out. One thing I really wanted to do, was be able to make great digital art with Photoshop, but after watching a lot of videos and doing a bunch of tutorials, I found myself being constantly amazed by creativity when using some of the filters in Photoshop. No matter how much I tried, I just can’t think like that. And there’s nothing wrong with that, I can do a lot of stuff with Photoshop, but I’ll never be able to make some of the things I wish I could. The key is to find something that you both enjoy working with and are able to do, there’s no sense in beating your head against a brick wall.
So what’s the point of all this? Keep at it and eventually you’ll figure it out, something will click and you’ll look back at your old stuff and wonder what the hell you were thinking! Trust me, that’s actually a good thing.
