The technologies, languages, and libraries introduced in class are well documented online. If you are having difficulties, please take time to first troubleshoot online by yourself. Good programming is good searching.
For this course you must make sure your computers have the following:
Codecademy is online learning platform with free and paid courses in numerous languages.
General Assembly recently launched a free course in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript called Dash.
A new platform for collaborative coding, Glitch, could be useful.
For isolating, testing, collaborating, and iterating code snippets:
For a good general overview:
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It's used to structure a webpage and its content. HTML is not a programming language, but a markup language.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It's a series of rules used to style a webpage. Like HTML, CSS is not really a programming language—it's a style sheet language.
JavaScript is the programming language of HTML and the web. Interaction with the user, animation, etc., are all done with JavaScript. jQuery is a library, or set of helpful add-ons, to the JavaScript programming language. In general, jQuery is much better at giving you immediate, visual results than regular JavaScript. In this class, it's likely you'll use a mix of basic JavaScript and jQuery.
Git is a version control system to keep track of (and share) changes in files. We'll be using GitHub and GitHub Pages to host our class sites. We'll be using Git and communicating with GitHub via the terminal, running on UNIX.
Markdown is a markup language that easily lets people add semantic formatting (like headings, lists, etc.) to text documents. Often it's used on the backends of websites or in readme files. Markdown files have the extension .md or .markdown.
If you want to create a site that uses markdown, try making a Jekyll or Kirby site. Note that they won't be able to run on GitHub pages, so let me know if you want to try.
Keyboard shortcuts can be a useful tool. With limited real estate on screens and multiple applications open, it’ll become important that you can quickly interact with your code, in plain text, the web inspector and in the browser. These are some common shortcuts, grouped by application, that you might want to use while working. This list is by no means all-inclusive and will change based on your own machine's keyboard, applications, user settings, and operating system.
These shortcuts are meant for the software most of us are using in this class: Google Chrome, Atom, and a macOS.
⌘ the Command Key symbol
⌥ the Option Key symbol
⇧ the Shift Key symbol
⌃ the Control Key symbol
Cut: ⌘X
Copy: ⌘C
Paste: ⌘V
Save: ⌘S
Save As: ⌘⇧S
Close Window: ⌘W
Switching between tabs: ⌃tab
Delete forward: fn del
Multiple Select: ⌘ click
Highlight text: ⇧ arrow keys
Highlight to end of line: ⇧⌘ arrow keys
Highlight to end of word: ⇧⌥ arrow keys
Comment out highlighted text: ⌘/
Find a folder or file in the project: ⌘P
To automatically close HTML tags (Atom): https://atom.io/packages/autoclose-html
In Atom, for a full list of shortcuts, go to File / Preferences / Keybinding.
You can also drag your 'interactive' folder into your text editor for quick access to all of its files and directories.
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