 One of the questions I hear the most often is what should I learn next? Where's my guide? How do I know the path that I need to chart out? But what if I told you there's actually a really easy to know exactly what you need to learn next and you don't need a roadmap or learning guide and you don't need to ask other people, you can figure it out all on your own really easily. Hi there my friend and friends, thank you for coming back for yet another video and in case you're new here, my name is Kevin and here on my channel I help people fall in love with CSS and if I can't get you to fall in love with it hopefully I can at least help you be a little bit less frustrated by it. But one thing people feel like would help them a lot is if I made a guide. I keep getting people asking me for where's my learning guide on how to get through all of my videos or like a path on like what videos to watch in what order and the problem is I'm at almost 700 videos now. I think it's a couple of weeks away and I'm going to hit 700 videos here on YouTube basically just about CSS which is absolutely insane and so I understand why people would want like you know that's a lot of videos how what order do I go through them and I totally get that it is overwhelming amount of information that's there and you when we're learning something we want to know okay I've done this I've done this like what what what do I need to know next because these are the things I've currently learned and at the very beginning it's actually pretty easy to usually do that because we're learning the fundamentals that we need for any given topic but speaking specifically of CSS you're going to learn things like the syntax and you're going to learn things like the box model you're going to have to learn how to select things the most common properties you're using and even that can feel really overwhelming when you're first like there's just so many different properties that you need to learn but as you start doing it more and more you start okay I'm remembering those and then I'm learning a few new other things along the way but you want to learn what's the next ones you need to know and the first thing I want to talk about is a bit more of the big picture of like how much overlap can you have because some of the things you'll look at will be like okay learn HTML then learn CSS then learn JavaScript and people feel like they need to be a master of one to move on to the next subject and I mean this applies also if it's smaller scale stuff right if it's one little property you don't need to become a master and fully understand exactly how it works you just need to be comfortable enough to use it to move on to start you know to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish basically but even with like you know learn CSS and then I get people ask me like when can I start learning JavaScript I've been doing this for a while I still don't think I'm good enough yet but like when can I you know when it would be a good idea to start learning JavaScript and it's probably now uh to be honest with you if you're wondering about it then start learning it you're not going to master CSS you're going to get better at it slowly over time as I just talked about I have almost 700 videos of me teaching it here I taught it in the classroom for six years I've been writing it for god knows how long now and I still don't feel like I'm a master of it in the sense that I'm still learning new things about it all the time every time I do something I'm reading about something I'm putting a script together for a video whatever it is or I just I'm browsing around and looking at cool stuff I keep learning new things and that's one of the reasons I love front end development is because it enables me to continually be learning new things and experimenting and trying and of course there's new things being added to CSS all the time and front end development in general which doesn't help that we're always feeling like maybe we need to catch up but I don't want you to feel like you need to be a master at anything before you start learning other parts of web development because they're so interrelated with one another but then we get back to that idea of what you know how can you make your own roadmap how can you know what the next thing you should be learning and say you are learning CSS right now and maybe now you decided you're going to go learn JavaScript because I said it would be a good idea but let's say you've gotten past the basics of CSS and you want to know okay what's the next thing I should do and this is where it's really hard for anybody to be able to tell you because where you're at is going to be different and but where you're going is going to be different from everyone as well and it's like then should you learn something like border radius next or should you learn box shadow next like you know making that type of choice I don't know it doesn't really matter which one you learn next and that gets even bigger picture of like should you learn grid first or should you learn flexbox first for layouts and I don't know it depends what you're trying to create and there's so many of these choices where you're going to end up learning both you're going to have to cover both because they're fundamental things that we use all the time but saying this one or that one should be the first one is really hard for me to be able to say or anybody because it's also so dependent on the context of what you're going to be creating and that's I really think the cheat code once you're past the basics the fundamentals there should be playlists I have a absolute fundamentals playlist it's kind of old now but I still think it's pretty good and so like that goes over all the foundational really early stuff and that's a lot easier to chart out and that's not just for CSS there's a you know you could do that with HTML you can do that with JavaScript you can do that with basically any topic of covering those fundamentals type ideas and then things just branch off from there and for me the easiest thing to do is actually choose to start building stuff and you probably hear this a lot when you're new it's like just go build something you I don't know what to build so I'll link to some resources down below that have things that you can build and you know you don't have to worry about the design side of things or I'll also link to a video that I've talked about some of the stuff before as well and but the idea is you want to just create things and they can be very simple things but you want to be practicing what you're learning and there's two different ways that this can actually help you know what to learn next because some of what you should learn next are things that you've already learned before and we'll circle back to that in a second but you might come on you want to do I know there's all like the typical things a to-do app a weather app things like that and there's going to be parts of creating that that you don't know how to do and that might be you know you've never done something with an API before and you need to figure that out or it could be much simpler you have a design and in that design there's rounded corners on stuff and you've never actually done that before and then you have to find out how border radius works and you're going to look at something and you're going to see right away the things that okay I have an idea of how this works and there's going to be ideas on I have no idea what these other things are or how I'd accomplish that well now I know exactly what I need to learn you might not know what the words are right you don't know that it's called border radius or it's box shadow and I keep using those because they're stuck in my head right now but you know that could be anything and we could even be a two-column layout you've never done two columns before so you have to look up you know CSS how to do two-column layout so you don't know the technical terms of it but you know what you need to learn and then you're going to find out what those technical terms are and then you're going to learn how to do that and the other thing that's going to happen is you're going to run into things that you know you've done and you've know you've learned and then you're going to try and do it you can't and this is those times where you're going to find those holes in your knowledge or gaps in your knowledge and this happens at the very beginners a lot of the time where they don't know how to start a project because they've been following so many tutorials and following along with all the different steps that when they go to do something on their own they're just completely blank at the beginning and they're like I don't know what the first thing I need to do is and that's perfectly normal that happens to so many people and it just means well that's where you need to start and you need to go and look okay this is how I start and then you're going to start it on your own and then by eventually the more stuff you build you're going to have to stop relying and looking up that very early stage but that does also lead me to say like don't follow along step by step with everything you're creating along with the tutorial even if you're writing all the code at one point you do need to break free because that's the points where you learn what you don't know is when you're trying to do something and you're having trouble accomplishing it or you don't know what you need to do to be able to do it that's teaching you what you need to do whereas if you're following a tutorial and you're just going through all the different steps that it's doing you're going through the paces you're learning about you're becoming aware of a lot of different things but you're not actually learning how to do it yourself you need to run into these problems on your own and try and figure them out on your own and maybe that means hitting you know pausing your code putting it off to the side opening up a browser window and looking at a tutorial that covers that topic and then implementing that in your own but when you just follow let's build a weather app together and go A to Z following along exactly of course you're not going to run into problems and everything seems super easy and then you go do it on your own and nothing works but watching tutorials online or reading blog posts you know tutorials online whether it's written or video they're polished there's no mistakes in there the mistakes that were made or edited out so you don't see them they're done ahead of time probably more than once to make sure everything worked properly and then they make a tutorial based on that and I know that because I've done a lot of them and I know the process that goes into it so people nobody's a perfect coder who just writes the code and everything works it's fine to look things up it's fine to you know get completely lost and have to rely on things and to relearn things you've learned before I look at my own videos that I've made like two years ago to remember how to do something completely normal that you're going to have holes in your knowledge from things you've already learned and that you're going to find a lot of holes in your knowledge for things that you haven't learned yet and you're going to start learning those things but instead of relying on like this is the path that I need to learn HTML or CSS don't try and follow a very specific guide because that's going to get you learning to things that you're probably not going to use very much and you're just going to forget about them anyway build stuff go and look up you get a design and try and make it go find something cool on code pen and try and copy it whatever it is just more stuff you make that's going to tell you exactly what you need to learn and if you are very new to HTML and CSS and you do want something that is a little bit structured to get you off the ground as I mentioned I do have a very beginner playlist that is right here for your viewing pleasure that will help you get you through those early days before you sort of have to branch off and start figuring out things a little bit more and with that I would like to thank my neighbors of awesome Andrew James Michael Simon Tim and Johnny as well as all my other patrons for their monthly support and of course until next time don't forget to make a unicorn on the internet just a little bit more awesome