Saturday 18 June 2016

2

What have I learned so far?

I've completed the 'Introduction to JS: Drawing & Animation'.

 I had originally started learning JS at Codeacademy but found that the immediate feedback offered by Khan Academy made the concepts more intelligible. By showing the way the code controlled the animation it was easier to grasp the concepts. Further, Codeacademy would often indicate that I had completed a section of coding even though I had a very strong suspicion that their evaluative criteria only recognised certain aspects of the code (usually the 'result') and so I didn't feel fully satisfied that I had fully comprehended and executed the task. You could argue that it was up to me to make the necessary corrections until I was satisfied. I would reply that I'd prefer to be absolutely confident in my work before moving on. This doesn't mean I've written-off Codecademy, I will return to it in the future to tackle its other courses. It's HTML course appears to be superior to Khan Academy's as it doesn't spoon-feed you so much and appreciates that at the core of HTML is the simple, pain-in-the-ass necessity to just <em learn /em> the tags. 

So far I feel like I've approached this in a pretty scattershot way, dipping into a topic which takes my fancy. While it is of course essential to grasp the rudiments of a language it doesn't appear necessary to lean it all in extensive detail; that would be akin to rote-learning the dictionary as a requisite for speaking the English Language. What is necessary is the deployment of the skills that you have learnt. So, I guess I'm going to have to build a website, in some way, shape or form.

A good friend of mine recommended Spiral Hosting and between the beginning and ending of this sentence I have bought the domain 'mouseispressed.com' and that's about as much as I understand from this recent transaction. It tells me that its status is pending and so I shall wait until that stops pending before I continue to stare at the screen in slack-jawed obliviousness. 

The objective of mouseispressed.com is as a workshop for developing my understanding. I expect I will commence with an unforgiving blandscape which I can update with cute little ideas and oases of showboating as I progress. If I ever get to the stage at which I have acquired some professional sheen I will use it as a catalogue of my abilities, though at that point I probably won't be using Spiral Hosting and will have figured out how to do it myself. Watch that space. If you want.

Also, I guess I'll take this blog materiel over to the blandscape once I've understood what the hell I'm doing. 

It's difficult determining what objectives to set myself. While the above carries the general gist it's the steps between that aren't especially clear. I'm thinking that it might be helpful if I continue with Codecademy on the HTML and web stuff, however monotonous it becomes.  Overall, I'm looking to work on HTML, JS and JQuery and might as well buy that John Duckett book (even though it looks like a magazine, but maybe visual learning is my meal ticket). 

No comments:

Post a Comment