I found this week’s Codecademy lessons on JavaScript (JS) and jQuery quite difficult. I got lost a lot because each new step built upon the last, and the lessons didn’t (unlike previous lessons) do a great job repeating each step over and over so it could sink in. Also, the building blocks of the language weren’t as simple, straightforward, and intuitive as I found those in HTML and CSS to be. The data types and console.log statement seem easy enough, but once we started building in operators and functions, arrays and loops, I got lost. I found myself needing hints and cheating to get the code… it was very frustrating.
Also, for the first several lessons I kept wondering how this language would jive with what we have learned in HTML and CSS. I think I would have preferred to have the JQuery lesson first, then the others to follow. That last lesson did a good job explaining how to link JS to the DOM and how they interplay with each other in real time on a website. Because I wasn’t able to attend class last week and missed our initial discussion about JS, I did some research on my own and found what I think are a couple good “Intro to JavaScript” resources others might find helpful:
- w3schools.com — https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_whereto.asp
- dummies.com — http://www.dummies.com/web-design-development/javascript/javascript-and-html/
- betterexplained.com — https://betterexplained.com/articles/the-single-page-javascript-overview/
- htmldog.com — https://www.htmldog.com/guides/javascript/beginner/
Questions for the week are: what is the recommended order for developing HTML, CSS, and JS?; could we inspect a couple webpages to see how they are using JS?; if I wanted to create a rotating image block, is that done using JS?; and is an RSS feed JS? Also, would one ever code JS in CSS?
I look forward to working through some examples in class on Wednesday and spending some more free time practicing all three languages!
Cheers,
Jane