“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.” - Richard Branson
The sets of coding challenges in this book will help you get the hang of HTML and CSS in less time than you might expect, and the knowledge will stick. You’ll catch onto concepts quickly. You’ll be less bored, and might even be excited. You’ll certainly be motivated. You’ll feel confident instead of frustrated. You’ll remember the lessons you learned in your web development book, long after you close the book. This book is regularly updated with the latest coding challenges and solutions.
Cognitive research shows that reading alone doesn’t buy you much long-term retention. Even if you read a book a second or even a third time, things won’t improve much, according to research.
Forget highlighting or underlining. Marking up a book gives us the illusion that we’re engaging with the material, but studies show that it’s an exercise in self-deception. It doesn’t matter how much yellow you paint on the pages, or how many times you review the highlighted material. By the time you get to Chapter 50, you’ll have forgotten most of what you highlighted in Chapter 1.
This all changes if you read less and do more—if you read a short passage and then immediately put it into practice. Washington University researchers say that being asked to retrieve information increases long-term retention by four hundred percent. That may seem implausible, but by the time you finish this book, I think you’ll believe it.
Practice also makes learning more interesting. Trying to absorb long passages of technical material puts you to sleep and kills your motivation. Ten minutes of reading followed by twenty minutes of challenging practice keeps you awake and spurs you on, and it keeps you honest.
If you only read, it’s easy to kid yourself that you’re learning more than you are. But when you’re challenged to produce the goods, there’s a moment of truth. You know that you know—or that you don’t. When you find out that you’re a little shaky on this point or that, you can review the material, then re-do the exercise. That’s all it takes to master a HTML and CSS book from beginning to end.
