Thursday, December 5, 2013

Day Three of My Forey into CSS

After the limitations I discovered in learning CSS as part of the Codecademy Web Fundamentals track, I decided I needed something a little more in-depth. I considered another online program such as Lynda.com, but they cost bucks. OK, not a lot of bucks, but I didn't feel like bugging my boss for his credit card again, especially since I already made him buy me this book.

So I decided to look through some of the other books I've collected over the years and have been ignoring, and I selected this book from 2009. Yes, I know there's a more recent edition available, but this one is in hand right now, so why wait? It seems enough to get me started and I'll have a leg up on CSS by the time the other book arrives.

The question now is whether or not to just concentrate on CSS or to do as Codecademy previously (through automation) suggested and move on to JavaScript via their tutorial? Interestingly enough, that track is telling me that I finished the first section in Introduction to Programming. I hadn't realized I'd let so many of these tasks incomplete until revisiting the site of my old haunts, or perhaps I should call them "my old sins."

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to at least see what I was supposed to have learned in the distant past. Especially since the book I ordered from Amazon yesterday addresses HTML5, CSS3, and (drumroll) JavaScript.

The CSS book I'm using at the moment is rather slow going, but it's taking me over some really basic stuff I went through at Codecademy, and I could probably use the review to continue cementing this into my leaky memory. Oh, I installed the TextWrangler code editor on my Mac at work. Not the greatest tool I've used, but it's free and does a descent job. I really miss how the online editor at Codecademy worked. You could toggle back and forth between the HTML and CSS tabs to do the editing, but the Results window instantly showed your changes. Beats having to continually refresh a web browser.

I find it interesting that after ignoring this blog for over a year, I should be writing daily blog posts here. Go figure.

1 comment:

  1. CSS is for styling. Make that text red, make that header 28px, etc.

    It's not really coding; it's styling. I wouldn't buy a book on CSS; just start using CSS in real world things, like this blog. (Blogger allows you to edit CSS for your blog.)

    JavaScript, on the other hand, is real code. If you can write JavaScript, you can build web apps.

    It might be helpful to look at some real-world JavaScript and CSS. Chavah Messianic Radio is a web app that uses JavaScript and CSS; you can browse its JavaScript here and its CSS here.

    ReplyDelete

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