Today I embark on an experiment. I've completed the front-end nanodegree with Udacity, but have had no formal computer science training or education in the past. I want to be sure my new career is on a firm foundation, so even if this is a step back, I'm enrolling in the Intro to Programming nanodegree with the goal of completing it over one monster-free weekend.
Wish me luck.
July 17 1:49 CDT
Signed up to CodePen's free service and checked out scratchpad.io. Both very similar to jsFiddle.net. Very basic, friendly for people who have done nothing on the internet put open a browser...even if that browser is IE.
1:58 pm
Five methods of Thinking
Procedural Thinking - clear and unambiguous instructions that follow a linear path
Abstract Thinking - finding generality (similarity) amongst seemingly different things
Systematic Debugging - process of relentlessly identifying the cause of a comp program failure This involves a four step process:
- Collect evidence (what makes the program fail?)
- Generate theories (what may have caused this problem?)
- Test those theories (if my theory is correct, how could I find out?)
- Fix the problem.
Technological Empathy - understanding how the computer operates, what it is good and bad at
Systems Thinking - breaking big problems down into smaller component pieces
2:15
Just about anyone can learn just about anything. The brain is incredibly flexible. With the proper inputs you can physically change the brain.
Finished the introduction
2:22 pm
Took an hour break, unloaded monster into grand monster mother's care. Opened a celebratory beverage and back, hopefully without further distractions for some time.
3:20 pm
Some basic terms:
World Wide Web - collection of HTML documents
HTML - hypertext markup language
hyperlinks - connects HTML pages (makes the internet web like)
Servers - Computers that host files that make up content on web.
Computers access servers for their files.
HTTP - the main protocol of the web
Internet - The world's largest computer network
Browser - A program that runs on your computer to display files found on the web
HTML is made up of many things including:
- text content (what you see)
- markup (what it looks like)
- references to other documents (images, videos...)
- links to other pages
...Some reasonably straightforward html quizes
3:38 pm
And a jab at everyone's favorite browser to hate..hahaha
HTML Attributes - <tag attr="value"> content </tag> attributes always equal a value
<a> anchor tag is very common - links attribute href to value of website.
<img> image tag uses attribute src, linked to url value to show an image. Use alt tag with text content incase link to image is broken, or user is visually handicapped. <img> is called a void tag; it requires no closing tag.
Very simple html quizzes...
There are inline and block elements. Block elements actually create "invisible boxes" around their content. Piece on difference in block and inline elements: http://www.impressivewebs.com/difference-block-inline-css/
Some inline elements include a, span, br, img, strong
Block elements include div, p, form
4:05 pm
Basic HTML Document <!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> <title> content </title> (displays in browser tag) <head> </head> <body> <b>content</b> </body> <head> </html>
Finishing up basics of web and html with Steve...
4:14 pm
Push together some quick notes from above into an html file for Project 0. -If you've played enough video games or watched too many movies I assure you, it's less mysterious than it sounds.
Stage0 complete and sent off. Post this feed and on to the next.
4:49 pm