How to remember JavaScript

JavaScript contains many things — lots of different methods and ways to do things. How do you remember them all?

If you ask around the web, many people will say you don’t have to remember everything since you can always google. But this answer doesn’t help — you can’t always Google everything, every time. If you forget absolutely everything and Google everything all the time, you’re going to be real slow when you code!

So what’s the alternative? What must you remember? What can you forget? That’s what this article is for.

Things you need to remember

The things you need to remember are the things you need to use on a daily basis to code. Examples include (but aren’t limited to):

• Declaring variables
• Conditional logic like if and for loops.
• DOM Manipulation stuff like querySelector and classList.
• How to traverse the DOM
• The Event Delegation Pattern and how to use it.
• Asynchronous JavaScript, which includes topics like Callbacks, Promises, Fetch, and how to read APIs.

Don’t worry about remembering everything upfront. You won’t be able to remember if you try to quickly cram everything into your brain — remember, you’re not studying for an exam!

It’s important to really understand what you’re learning, so make notes and refer to them as you practice. When you practice enough times, the things you constantly use will start to become a part of you.

So you don’t actually “remember” JavaScript. You keep using what you need to use until it becomes part of you. You can always refer to the notes you made (which helps you remember stuff much easier).

Things you don’t have to remember

Things you don’t have to remember are things you don’t use often!

Why?

If you don’t use things to the point that they’ve become part of you, you’ll forget them. This is how our brains work. If we don’t use it, we lose it. So it’s a given that you will forget things.

For example, accessibility is something I don’t use on a daily basis. I constantly forget about accessibility — especially the complex parts — even though I wrote an entire module on accessibility in Learn JavaScript!

When I need to, I can refer back to the lessons I wrote about accessibility to refresh my brain on both concepts and syntaxes that I need to know. There’s no need to force myself to remember things I’m not familiar with yet.

Push yourself, but don’t force yourself

It’s healthy to try and push yourself to understand things. The better your understanding, the easier it is for you to remember.

That said, please remember to be kind towards yourself — don’t beat yourself up for forgetting, don’t rush yourself so much that you skip concepts without understanding them.

Don’t try to learn fast, try to learn well instead, and you’ll end up learning faster in the end.

Try this: Give yourself one week to try the method I suggested. Let me know how it goes!