#codecadamy

and onto Python... the reason i headed to codecademy in the first place! The codecademy Python lessons aren't bad, but unfortunately they didn't provide what i was looking for. I was hoping, as part of their 'code year', that after heading though javascript, html, css, and jquery the lessons would focus on using Python for server-side scripting, but instead the lessons presumed you had never written a line of code in your life, taught you what a string was, and as such were pretty useless.

As for Python itself, well, its a whole new language, and playing around for a couple of hours isn't going to get me far. Anyway, observations/minor gripes...

i dislike the whitespacedness... a lot of peoples arguements seems to be along the line that 'you indent your code anyway, so what's the problem', but i think there is a big difference

the exponent operator ** led me into trouble about what the exponent of a negative number is. turns out -3**2 is -9, and this is the same in written maths. crazy if you ask me!

'Python saves you from the switch statement!' - i hate claims like that, but they're not limited to the Python community. the switch statement is good!

So onto jQuery - after working through codecadamey's javascript/html/css lessons i was looking forward to their jQuery ones, but unfortunately the site took a massive turn for the worse at this point. I fought through, it was no longer enjoyable, but at the end i feel i know what jQuery is about, and as a library i think it is great, and as a directional focus of a meandering javascript i think it is wonderful.

jQuery does things simply, and with purpose. Selection is straightforward and powerful, complimented with add, first, last, eq, not, filter, navigation is sensible  (if maybe oddly named) with children, find (not descendents?), parents, closest (not ancestors?) and modification through the html, width, height, css and add/removeClass functions are all good.

Element creation, insertion, removal.... everything - i found to be agreeable. The events were straightforward and seemed to make sense. I like this library, basically! Effects! Plugins!

Noticed a tweet announcing that Codecademy was starting a Python track, and thought I would have a look since Python is one of the many things on my todo list.

Instead ended up playing for a loooonnnng time. They have a great online learning experience Code Year, i guess it's meant to take a year. I have so far worked through Javascript, HTML and CSS, which is about 80& of the course. It's all fairly straightforward and beginner focused, but i am interested in the ways in which coding is taught to beginners online (ever since finding this wonderful Ruby tutorial), and find it quite interesting working through these tutorials. Definitely a much gentler introduction than my first-year uni course!

The rest of the course is jQuery, and then Python, two things i don't know and want to learn, so i will save those for the future.

My main problems with Code Academy are that it seems your code can be quite wrong, but as long as it compiles (or passes some sometimes seemingly random checks), you will get a pass mark, whilst other times it will keep failing and you will have no idea why, i think the engine may even screw up sometimes and it fails when it should pass.

Also, and i believe this is due to different people writing each section, the flow is a bit off, some things are skipped over, while other topics are hammered a little too much.. but that is really a minor gripe.

So the first section, and a massive one, is all about Javascript. Everytime i code in Javascript it makes me want to cry, apart from things like type-checking, here are some of my issues.

Inheritance: A class is defined through a constructor, then linked to a base-class afterwards. Urrggh.

function Penguin(name) { 

this.name = name;

    this.numLegs = 2;

}

function Emperor(name) {

    this.name = name;    

}

Emperor.prototype = new Penguin();

Access modifiers! They exist, which is good, but this.blah means public, while var blah means private... gah!

function Person(name,age) {   

this.name = name;

var age = age;

}

And... hmm.. i swear there were more. However, there are some nicely done things, like function pointers

function Account() {

   var bankBalance = 7500;    

   var returnBalance = function() {

   return bankBalance;

  };          

this.askTeller = function() {

    return returnBalance;

   };

}

and reflection....

for (var prop in languages)

{

if (typeof languages[prop] == "string")

console.log(languages[prop]);

}

The HTML section on Code Year is tiny, and unsatisfying. It touches on only a few concepts, like images, lists, tables, and links. Maybe there isn't much more to HTML, but i feel this section could've covered forms, and touched on HTTP concepts such as GET and POST.

Fortunately, things pick up again in the CSS section. My CSS is terrible, i know what it does, but for me knowing css is basically having a little black book of tricks to get things done, and these lessons were great for improving mine! From the simple:

Note that margins are outside of the border, while padding is inside. 

To useful, but brief guides to selector weighting

style="" score 1000

# id selectors = 100

.class selectors = 10

Most other selectors = 1

and positioning

static - relative to where it should be according to the DOM, the default

relative - relative to its static position

absolute - relative to its first non-static parent*

fixed - relative to the window

*It is also interesting to note that when no styling is applied to the child, it stays within the parent. Only when we apply an attribute does the absolute positioning take effect.