Dave Learns Coding

Thursday, November 24, 2016

HTML Basics. Notes from Treehouse and Practice done on Code Academy.

I finally learned what html is and how it's relevant to making websites. I think for me the best way to learn is through video instruction. So I learned on teamtreehouse.com and then I practiced both at teamtreehouse and codeacademy. I like codeacademy because of the three-plan view because visually I can see how instruction leads to application which leads to output.

Here are my notes from teamtreehouse's html course:

Intro to HTML and CSS (Languages)

Hypertext Markup Language

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)

HTML structures a site with a set of tags <tag> </tag> … like a blue print

CSS … what we content to look like … color, highlight color, and etc

H1 to H6 … controls heading and comes with default sizes

Class?

Other Technologies

Front End: HTML/CSS/Javascript

Back End: Python, Ruby, Java work with database to save, change , and store data

Javascript… adds interactivity like slideshow and etc.

Inside body box:

Header

Main

Footer

<!doctype html>

Is the only thing outside of <html> and </html> tags… it lets browser know that you’re asking it to display an html document

<head> tag

Has a lot of invisible information about the page such as

<title> changes what browser tab views

<link> tags connect to css and javacript files

<meta> provides information that is used by browsers and search engines

BODY

<body>

<header> often provides information on company logo, purpose of site, name, main navigation menu

<main>

<footer>

IMG tag often has attributes that provides additional information which provides instruction for the browser

Example: src / alt/ class

Class: control elements on how things are styled

SRC and ALT are necessary

src attribute points to a file pack to the location of the image files

Alt … means alternative text which requires a precise description - if image path is broken or image is unavailable

*self closing tags do need a closing tag like <img> tags

ANCHOR TAGS <a></a> … whatever is between them is clickable

BUT nothing happens till you add “href” which stands for.. Hyperlink text reference

HTML Lists

ul : unordered lists

ol : ordered lists

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Day 02 | After Days and Days of Research...

After days and days of research and countless visits to quora, coursereport, udacity, teamtreehouse, skillcrush, and other site related to coding education, I think I finally settled on a strategy.

First, the offline coding bootcamp option for me is challenging for me at this point in my life stage - wife and kids. There, of course, great reasons for doing a traditional bootcamp. Namely, the time you spend on coding and learning is incomparable to what you can do online. The social learning aspect is also a big plus in my book. Anytime you go through a challenging course with other people to ask questions, commiserate with, share pain with make that course more digestible - and fun. Lastly, most boot camps try to get you a job.

Which leads me to my decision for a course of action - online.

I plan to enroll in teamtreehouse because quite simply their videos are more "watchable". There's a cohesion and uniformity to the videos. Udacity and others seem on the less professional side and more on the quirky side.
I plan to enroll in Udacity's "Front End Development" nano degree course. Why? Because they have more success cases of job placement.
I also plan to use codeacademy because I like the application of principles - i.e. it's actual coding. I like learning through repetition.

I'm waiting for Black Friday to see if any of these sites have any sort of deals.

Friday, November 11, 2016

Day 01 | The Decision

That's not really me - not yet, anyway.

Okay. So it sounds like it was an easy call to learn to code. Well, it wasn't. Why? Because I have a job - a good one at that. I'm an educator who teaches kids how to read and write. Side note: You're going to see a lot of mistakes - both grammatical and structural - in these posts but that's only because I have to write quickly. See above: I'm learning to code. I have limited hours so I don't have time to go back and spell check nor grammar check.

Then, why learn coding?

There's plenty of reasons for coding - least of which is that it seems like the new lingua franca of the new world and the next generation. I feel like software is eating the world - and jobs! I have to be somewhat prepared for the next wave of the future.

Why now?

Because there's not time like now to learn. There are numerous resources, some of which are free and some of which cost actual money. I like the former but for education - and it may be my old school mentality - but actually putting up money to learn something is a sign to the vendor and more importantly, myself that I'm serious about doing it.

So where did I look when beginning this journey?

Honestly, I asked people first. I asked friends who were either in technology related industries and more importantly, people who knew me. I like to this story about how an old friend of mine who used to attend the "H" college in Boston once wrote me out of the blue. He said, "Hey Dave, why don't you look into this vlogging thing. I think you'll be good at it." That was like his only email to me - like ever. I thought that it wasn't for me because in my mind I was an "auteur" in the vein of Scorsese, Wong Kar Wai, and Spike Lee. A couple of years later, vlogging took off - and of course, without me. Sometimes the people around you whether they are good friends or not, know and see you the way you can't see yourself. Sometimes they are right in their assessment of the gifts and qualities you have and how it can fit in a certain role.

Did someone say you'd be good at coding?

Not exactly. I'm not even sure I'd be good at it. But most of the people I know and respect said that I should learn it. So here I am blogging about it. WHY? Because I love sharing with others ways that may improve their prospects of a better life with regards to more opportunities.

You can probably research all the different sites like coursera, udacity, freecodecamp, bloc, viking school, treehouse and many many more.

Long story short, I chose teamtreehouse.com over udacity because quite simply, I liked their videos from a learning perspective. I know the teachers over at udacity are legit, ie super qualified but for me the uniformity and consistency of the video lectures made me feel at ease in going into such a foreign field. Know what I mean? My software engineer friend tried to get me to go to udacity and just use their nanotech degree syllabus and look for the individual lectures for free but I kept on going back to Treehouse for some reason.

I'm not even sure if the treehouse.com tech degree means anything to anyone, but for me, the 7 day free trial was enough to get me to sign up. And when I did sign up, they offered the first month at half the original cost. So basically, they were offering their $199/mo. price for about $99.50.

Did I stop there? No. I then somehow stumbled across freecodecamp.com which I never even heard of before starting this journey. I was perusing the usual authority sites like quora.com and reddit.com for honest reviews of online coding programs and freecodecamp.com kept on getting mentioned for: a) being free and b)application based

So now, this is my setup so far.

I'm taking teamtreehouse's "tech degree program" for full stack development java script for $199/mo. And I'm using freecodecamp.com to get in extra work as I'm learning on teamtreehouse.

For instance, I started with HTML on teamtreehouse. The videos were helpful understanding the basic principles of HTML and CSS but I really needed to practice - even though there are application exercises on teamtreehouse. I found that I needed more exercises. That's the reason I'm on freecodecamp.com as well. I'm glad I'm on it because not only did they get me to find a local FB group of aspiring software engineers but they also helped me sign up for a github.com account as well. More on that later.

This blog post is getting long so I'll continue Day 01 on the next post.