This is week 7 of the 12 week Code Louisville Front End Web Development Track. It seems most students have decided on a project and are actively working on their project. Some students have already made their initial commit to GitHub, and others are close and will be doing that soon.
I’m working on a portfolio project. I’ve created a sketch of the design, and I have a basic idea of what I want the site to look like. I have created the basic file structure for the project, and I’m working on the HTML structure first. I’ve added a little CSS so I can see the layout of the structure and a header.
I’m working on a mobile first design philosophy. I’ll add media queries in the CSS to format for tablet and desktop screen sizes.
I’ve also gone back again this week to continue some extra study on JavaScript. While I’ve made progress with the aid of the LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com) Foundations of Programming: Fundamentals videos on JavaScript by Simon Allardice, I still want to make additional progress with JavaScript. So, this week I decided to try the Learn JavaScript course on Codecademy.
Treehouse is mostly video taped lectures followed by coding challenges and quizzes. Treehouse covers the material in depth, and in a little larger chunks. Codecademy has very concise text based descriptions with immediate hands-on coding projects. The coding is broken down into very small pieces and then builds hands-on fluency through repetition. This really struck a cord with me, and I made huge strides in JavaScript in a single night completing their sections on variables, loops, and functions.
Truthfully it was more of a review for me at this point, but the required hands-on repetition really worked well for me at this stage of my learning. I’m extremely happy with the combination and slightly different approaches between Treehouse and Codecademy. To top it off, Codecademy is free with an optional paid level that includes quizzes, a training plan, and mentors. Obviously time is an issue for Code Louisville students, but as your schedule permits, I would advise incorporating both Codecademy and LinkedIn Learning/Lynda.com , along with your Treehouse courses as you are able.
This week our Treehouse courses are Ajax Basics and Object-Oriented JavaScript. These courses build upon the JavaScript basics that have already been taught. They are therefore classified as intermediate level courses and not for beginners.
AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. In short, it is the use of the XMLHttpRequest object to communicate with server-side scripts. It can send as well as receive information in a variety of formats, including JSON, XML, HTML, and even text files.
Object-oriented programming will allow you to build websites using reusable blocks of code known as libraries. The Object-Oriented JavaScript course teaches web developers how to utilize the various object-oriented programming features within JavaScript, and more importantly, how to write reusable and maintainable libraries that will make programming easier and reduce repetition of code.
That is it for this week at Code Louisville. See you all next week!
Read my next Code Louisville update here.
