Even with a lot of work both on the professional and educational side, I feel like I was able to make a big step towards gaining “jQuery proficiency” this week. Codecademy explains everything quite clearly and turned out to be a great resource, even though at first it seemed quite scary and overwhelming with information. In my opinion, the website is very good if you are a beginner in a given field, since the courses available on it provided me with a foundation that I am excited to use in the future. Also, this week I had the opportunity to complete the jQuery course on that website, which turned out to be quite straightforward, but rather stimulating experience. Another part of my study involved finding commonalities between HTML, CSS and jQuery, as combining them all together would surely be helpful to produce a great piece at the end of the course. As of today, I still need to watch more videos and do some research on this area of study, in order to strengthen the knowledge I already have and the language skills I might gain through completing another set of lessons next week.

Moreover, in the last couple of days I was able to reach out to a developer (through a friend) with a fascinating background in programming. I believe his interesting experience and knowledge can be a good resource for a programming novice such as me. Right now, I am working on some specific questions to ask him and drafting a profile that might be helpful to both me and students who will have the possibility to read it in the future. To conclude, I am looking forward to conducting an interview with him and excited to learn more about programming and the ways it can benefit my future career.

Coming into this class, I only had a vague understanding of JavaScript (let alone jQuery). After this lesson and the previous one, it’s neat that everything is a lot clearer on a fundamental level. It’s also awesome how the latter gives you the ability to significantly reduce the line amount of JavaScript due to its shortcuts (being the purpose of compression-oriented library). I think it also speaks to the relative openness that developers have when it comes to sharing (Google hosting for jQuery).

I think linking the CSS and jQuery pages to change multiple aspects using jQuery at the same time is a breath of fresh air. All the while, as the lessons noted, it still presents the possibility of things getting even more hectic within the page (if they’re not grouped/organized separately and intentionally). The mouseleave functions in the lessons were also really interesting. And the .animate( ) function is a neat tool. I haven’t thought much about how the standard practices incorporate significant design insight.

I remember in class, I believe someone asked why we would intentionally have a hidden element that would be unhidden upon the user’s activity. The mouse hovering over the menu button in this case was a time for using it that I had not beforehand thought of. Toggling the fade elements for the add to cart design is another interesting function.

Reviewing the DOM method was also good. In addition to that, specifically targeting descendant elements and excluding others.

Midterm

I’m looking forward to working on and finishing my profile. My web developer is with Facebook, and his company’s attention to all of the aforementioned possibilities in crafting visually appealing and intuitive websites is verified by the amount of users that it has worldwide. That, and the criticism it receives after the slightest update or change.

For this week’s tutorial lesson on Codecademy for jQuery, I wasn’t initially sure what it was in comparison to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. However, I learned that it was essentially just an extension of JavaScript, or what they referred to as a “library.” I thought it was neat to be able to accomplish the same dynamic function that JavaScript enables, just instead using JQuery with a way smaller amount of lines of code.

When reading about the structure of where to input certain elements when writing your code, Codecademy explains that HTML loads from top to bottom. In essence, it makes sense, but it’s just not something that I had thought about when learning HTML and such. So, putting JQuery at the bottom of your code allows it loads after everything else. This was like a low-key lightbulb moment for me to understand that this is the reason behind why pop-ups and elements controlled by JavaScript and jQuery are the last things loaded on a webpage.

Using jQuery seemed a lot simpler, which is great since I’m sure that is its purpose – using $() to target elements makes it easy to identify throughout the code and it remains consistent. Additionally, using the period sign as a means to attach the handler is practically the simplest way I could think of for connecting method that triggers a return function.

All in all, JavaScript was easier to learn than CSS for myself. In comparison to jQuery, JavaScript seems more difficult and time-consuming, because it is. Either way I am glad that the lessons are somewhat easier to digest the farther we get along with the lessons. The only thing is, Codecademy makes it so easy to learn and understand the material even when I’m not understanding it. It’s when I go to GitHub or another page and see a blank page then I feel like I’m lost, have no idea what to type or where to start.