ASP.NET Core learning journey

The various learning methods you describe don’t seem to include tutorials and structured learning materials. Those are generally the best place to start.

For example, the vendor provides learning materials. There are also a great many other resources for tutorials and courses, both free and paid. Your favorite search engine can help you find plenty.

You definitely have the right idea to dive in and write code. Self-driven tinkering is a great way to supplement learning materials. But don’t skip those materials entirely.

This sound like a fairly normal way to approach when learning a new framework. A few things I would add:

1. Learn how to look up documentation. In some cases just reading the comments for library methods are sufficient. In other cases it can be useful to check the full documentation page online. The documentation often contains examples or useful notes about how something is intended to be used.
2. Write prototypes. If you do not know how something work, sometimes the simplest approach is to test it. This might be as simple as writing a unit test, or you might write a small throwaway application. This should help you confirm any assumptions you have about how things work.

While LLMs might help when learning it still makes mistakes, so I would be hesitant to rely on it as an example of how something should be written. Put in another way, if the AI generates code that contains errors you might not be able to spot the errors if you are not already familiar with the framework. And if you generate to much code at once it might be just about impossible to know where in the code the error is.

I often look at code from my previous projects, understand the underlying logic, and then adapt or rewrite it to fit my current project instead of copying it directly.

Good. I have nearly 30 years experience as a software developer. And I do this all the time.

"How can I ...." so I search the internet for examples. Stack Overflow answers often shows up in the results. I read, looking for the clue to the thing I don't yet understand (or just to jog my memory).

I search for documentation on the keywords / functions / types I don't know and read that. Picking up the correct glossary. What new words have I found, what do people call this thing. So I can search for better resources.

Sometimes I build my own little widget, to test what works. To better understand edge cases. To really nail down what this thing is that I'm trying to understand.

Then I use this thing I've discovered to solve my original problem. Or prove that it can't be done that way and I should try another approach.

Maybe I'll go back to Stack Overflow and post a comment to clarify something. Maybe I'll write my own Answer (with a capital A). Along the way I've learnt something new.

The scope of software development is large. You will never learn it all. Or you will box yourself into a single skill set, never growing beyond that. And that would bore me to tears.

Yes, just watching videos and nothing else probably is a waste of time.

Which is why I didn’t suggest that.

Some learning materials may include video content. But just passively watching that content is not recommended. Instead, you are encouraged to actively engage in your learning and practice by also building and generally tinkering with what you build.

Which you claim to already be doing. So it’s not clear why you’d abandon that as soon as a video starts playing…

Copy+Paste is the #1 skill for a developer these days. That's said sorta in jest, but not completely, there aren't many times when you need to reinvent the wheel, very often you are lifting and modifying code from somewhere else.

Whats most important is understanding concepts. Syntax changes over time, you might end up using a different language eventually, but concepts are valid regardless of the technology stack.

I would say there seems to be a lot of people at the moment trying to speed up their learning. But nothing beats practise and making mistakes. You'll learn so much more when you debug your first complex issue then when you get stuff right the first time. Good things take time - don't be in a rush 😊

I also struggle to engage with video tutorials. Written ones from books or blogs etc work better for me, especially if I can type/paste the code in immediately as I go along and run it, then play about with it and change something to experiment. Whether it's video or not the main thing is to make sure you have some structure. Use whatever learning method and media works for you.

And if you're struggling to remember the specifics of syntax don't worry - most of us do. It's certainly not the most important thing...it's why we have documentation, auto-complete, previous code etc. As someone else said the most important thing is to grasp the concepts.

Yes you are right but when I watch tutorials it feels like waste of time and also I can't focus the video that I am watching

You mentioned that you don't know much of the C# and ASP.NET syntax, it's a common symptom among younger programmers. Let's be clear: you're not alone in this, so don't feel discouraged. Still, this is a highly competitive field. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to strengthen your arsenal — your programming skills.

And syntax is only the surface. It's the way you express logic to the computer, telling it what you want it to accomplish. The logic itself requires systematic training. While learning C# syntax is important, it is even more important to study programming more broadly — by reading books or taking courses on topics such as object‑oriented programming, networking, and databases, and more.

With these skills established, you'll find it easier to read other people's code or code generated by AI, and understand what it is meant to accomplish. You will know how to fix errors from AI hallucinations. You'll also find it easier to collaborate with colleagues in the future, which is a crucial part of a programmer's career.