With the Landsat 8 TOA reflectance collection loaded into a variable called l8, you saw that the following code results in a recent-value composite:
var landsat2016 = l8.filterDate('2016-01-01', '2016-12-31'); Map.addLayer(landsat2016, visParams, 'l8 collection');
One of the problems with this composite is that it's full of clouds. Instead of just taking the last pixel in the collection (when you add a collection to the map, Earth Engine implicitly calls mosaic() on it), you can reduce the ImageCollection (Learn more about reducing image collections).