Code Academy: JQuery and JavaScript

If the Web Fundamentals Course was like eating a tasty peanut butter and cholocate pie, jQuery (jQ) and JavaScript (JS) we’re like eating a bitttersweet pie and a pebble pie, respectively.

jQuery…

Not as easy to pick up as HTML and CSS, but not too bad either.

What is jQ? Officially, it’s a javascript library.

I moved through the course pretty fast and honestly don’t remember much of it. I did take extensive notes (hence the above definition), and made sure I at least understood what I was doing before I moved on. I did, or at least I thought I did.

JavaScript…

The humble pie experience of a lifetime!

What is JS? Officially, it’s

I was lost in JS from the get go, and I admit that I only finished the course with some serious, frequent help from the forum, often just copying other folks’ code directly and rejoicing that the code was accepted.

About 80% of the way I through, I about gave up. I think I only finished the course, because I knew I would need the info eventually, and everyone loves a slider on their website! Sliders, I found out, we’re primarily made with JS, much to my chagrin.

Happy to be out of the woods, I was eager to move on to the next course… PHP.

Estimated hours of learning and practice: 30

Amount of ground I felt like I covered: next to none

Encouragement level: what the heck am I getting myself into? (that is, low)

One thing I do remember learning in this section was the “while loop”. A while loop is a repeating loop of code that will run as long as the while condition is met. If the loop is told to run while a variable equals “x”, and that variable never changes, the while loop will run forever, or at least until your browsers freezes and crashes or your website breaks.

Caution is the key, and making sure you can always edit your code outside of it’s running environment (e.g. by using an FTP client) is always a good practice should you break something.

Onward!