Codeacademy

So who is gonna do this with me?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/01/learn_to_program_make_a_free_weekly_coding_lesson_your_new_year_s_resolution_.html

It starts on the 9th.

4 sure. where's hoos.

I'm in.

finished the first lesson + the Fizzing and Buzzing thing!

I will do this later tonight

I'm in. First lesson on tap for tomorrow.

Just finished the first lesson, but FizzBuzz looks too complicated for this time of night. Not sure quite how well I'll do, but it wasn't too bad so far.

I like this so far I'm on lesson 6 - I dunno if you're supposed to do them one per day or as a bunch?

I'm doing this too!

I'm in too!

Awesome, I'm on this thing too. Now I hope I can do this for a year...

I just signed up but I've missed the first lesson. Is there a way of catching up?

on codeacademy.com there's a tab on top called Courses. I think you can find the first week's worth of stuff there.

(I'm guessing that's the first week, which you end with that FizzBuzz exercise)

Ah ok thanks, I'll check it out.

My Javascript isn't up to much so I might give this a go.

My new job may involve using it a bit more, I'm not sure yet.

I'm in, I fiddle a bit with JQuery, but learning standard Javascript is something I should learn.

lol so I'm already stuck on fizzbuzz p2. what's going wrong here?

// Write a statement that decides if the variable `i` is divisible by 3.

// for the numbers 1 through 20,
for ( i=1; i<=20; i++) {

// if the number is divisible by 3, write "Fizz"
if ( i%3=0 ) {
console.log("Fizz");
}

// otherwise, write just the number
else {i

}
}

http://learncodethehardway.org/

xpost try
else {console.log(i)}}

?

why are you using console.log() in only one of the conditional clauses?

cause I tried the other way too and it didn't work!

if ( i%3=0 )

Take a look back at this lesson page
http://www.codecademy.com/courses/programming-intro/5#!/exercises/0

and console yourself with the knowledge that this is probably the #1 most common and annoying bug in programming a C-like language

(that was me trying not to spell the answer out completely but I possibly just succeeded in sounding vague and dickish so if need be I'll be more direct)

haha ty

you need double equal sign ==

haha lol I completely glossed over that

triple even? they said there was a difference between double and triple

triple double check

hah I didn't even think about == which is really dumb of me since I am writing Python code today. Told you my Javascript sucks.

I'm sure this is gonna get really annoying for ppl who actually program but I'm finding it fun / pretty well-designed so far

yeah i was enjoying myself doing this. but now i'm kind of going insane being stuck at the part where you have to make 15=fizzbuzz.

Spoilers:

____________
if {
15 'fizzbuzz' bit
}
else {
everything else
}
____________

there's another week before new material so it's not horrible to be stuck for a while and think it over. I like that it's not patronizing enough to make us do super easy stuff for hours at a time but at the same time you sorta need to repeat something a lot of times / ponder over it in order to really get it in your head.

i agree. my only concern is what happens if you legitimately get stuck and can't really see where you're going wrong/what needs to be done? i'm glad to see there are ppl here who can help but they might get bored of answering simple requests. you can probably google the answers too and thus get the right one without really understanding why its right and why you were messing up.

I'm sure this is gonna get really annoying for ppl who actually program but I'm finding it fun / pretty well-designed so far

― iatee, Tuesday, January 10, 2012 10:46 AM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah this is fun!

i'm glad to see there are ppl here who can help but they might get bored of answering simple requests. you can probably google the answers too and thus get the right one without really understanding why its right and why you were messing up.

― Jibe, Tuesday, January 10, 2012 11:08 AM (13 minutes ago)

firefox -> tools -> web developer -> error console

we'll see how it goes I guess. I like the pace so far, and w/ a group of people doing it I could see it working?

also I don't think we'll be encountering any 'higher level thinking skills' problems for a long time, right now it's just 'how do we format this'

xp

or firebug

if it consoles u (punz, lol) iatee, i forgot about the === entirely and originally wrote ( i % 3 is 0 ). imagine my shock when they didn't recognize the 'is' syntax.

Okay, I'm stuck on the "Fizzbuzz". I could code it so that for the iteration of 15 it says FizzBuzz, but I'd prefer to code it so that it would check for any numbers divisible by both 3 and 5 (so, for instance, if I changed the count length it would still work and say FizzBuzz in the right place). But I can't work out how to do it.

I think "and" is && in Javascript if that helps?

SPOILER TAGZ

for ( i % 3 === 0 ) {
for (i % 5 === 0 ) {
console.log ("Fizzbuzz");
}
else {
console.log ("Fizz");
}

^^ I think that's how I did it.

fizzbuzz done!

the second for should be an if i think

yeah i did an &&

emily, you can nest one if/else inside another if/else. if that helps?

^ that's what i did

Thanks guys. I tried "&" but I don't think any of the lessons had mentioned "&&" before. I was so close!

I think their preferred method was nesting, but the && trick seemed more natural to me?

I'm still stuck on buzz tbh

I keep toying around with } and { everywhere

anyone still doing this?

Does it have C#?

I dipped in when they added Python, but I'm not really "still doing it".

No C#: it has Javascript, Python, Ruby, and web stuffs (HTML, CSS, jquery). Think I finished the JS and the Python, dipped into the HTML/CSS but got bored early on, haven't tried jQuery or Ruby.

I need to get into this again got lazy/busy

if anyone wants to join me for python it's easier w/ a motivation buddy

I still need to do the jQuery & CSS ones. Job responsibilities currently more based in Python & SQL which I've been using for years, but will be doing more front end work in a couple of months so I need to get up to speed soon.

I did a bunch of the Python lessons and I learned a lot, but they're all user submitted, and vary wildly in quality. Some of them are so broken that it's impossible to tell when you did everything right and the parser is still refusing to accept the code, or when you did something wrong but the parser accepts your bad code anyway. It reminds me of having, like, an incompetent community college teacher working from a good book.

hi i love learning

im going to be learning this stuff in classes over the next few months.

would it, iyo, be worth bashing my head off these courses first or am i best off just absorbing it in real times at college

Blow through the official courses to get the gist, then mess around with the user-created code for a more significant hands-on experience. I'm not yet a 'coder' but I made some progress getting the mental framework together using this method.

tks will give it a blast (if i get time)

It's probably a good introduction to the mindset but your actual course may have a more pedantic focus so some of the more "this just works" aspects may need unlearning again afterwards, or not - depends a lot on the course.

What is the official title of your course and do you know what languages it'll be using?

(If it's called Computer Science it may be pedantic and hands-off; if it's called Information [___] Technology it may be hands-on, get-stuff-done-quick; if it's Software Engineering it may be hands-on but still pedantic; Informatics could be anything. These distinctions aren't made v. rigorously in the UK compared to in the US though, dunno about Ireland but may well be the same.)

also you will hate the lame jokes and Monty Python references throughout Codecademy but you'll probably hate everything 98% of your fellow students think is funny too so maybe it's good practice for that.

it's a higher diploma in computing, i bleev it specifically says computer science here and there

reading around the subject is always good.

Yeah, reading is good, sorry if I made it sound like it isn't.

Udacity's CS101 is OK (course materials are at https://www.udacity.com/wiki/cs101/downloads if you don't want to sign up - can't remember if you can see the youtubes without signing up) and brings up more concepts that you'll probably see on your course, but on the other hand there's something to be said for Codecademy's more fun and more hands-on approach too.

PS I am a serial CS-then-ICT dropout so actually probably the worst person to take the advice of

i'm doing the ruby section of this for fun and it really is fun. but i blew through like 60% of what's available in a short time. what is one to do next to make progress?

I'm doing this! Since it's been 10+ years since I had a programming class, I'm going all the way back to the beginning. I mean <em><strong>ALL</strong><em> the way back.

can you have friends on this thing? harbl, be my friend!

sent from my butt (harbl)
Posted: December 27, 2013 at 10:18:29 PM
i'm doing the ruby section of this for fun and it really is fun. but i blew through like 60% of what's available in a short time. what is one to do next to make progress?

build a websyteeeeee

i hope someone at codecademy is reading the funny stuff that i'm writing when they ask me to write paragraphs and stuff like that. seriously there's been some comedy gold, hope they're checking it out and laughing

youre the one theyve been waiting for

I might try doing this again. I petered out fairly quickly last time.

I know it would be deeply unethical, but it would be neat if they collected all of the things that people chose to wrote and published them as one <ol>list</ol>

btw this week i'll be peppering my posts with beginning html tags, hope everyone is ok with that

I can't find a way to add friends or start a custom ilxor group. boo.

Yeah I haven't done this for a while, been meaning to learn jQuery and also my html/css is super-rusty and I'm meant to do some web stuff for work now so it might be an idea to pick it back up, but I have mile-long list of good intentions of that kind so eh

yeah, it's kind of weird that they don't let you make a group or add "friends"! some commenters on one of their help page were speculating that codecademy intends to monetize the site by selling it to businesses/organizations, who would then get to take advantage of custom groups/friends/etc.

The problem with not doing it for several months is that they rewrite half the ones you've already done so they're not ticked off any more and my completionist tendencies go nuts

oh, didn't see this, karl. i did finish all of ruby but now i've done nothing for a few weeks so i forgot it all and too much to do with my actual job :(

1 Year Passes...

so yeah, i fizzled out as well. iirc, i started to sense that the instruction was really thin in some areas, like i was rushing through all of CSS in like 45 minutes and i needed way more time and repetition. i guess i should have just slowed myself down and assigned myself exercises and tried to experiment a little more.

but i kind of want to try something else out, a little more in-depth. has anyone tried udacity? are there other good alternatives? i'd be willing to pay a little bit for something a little better. a little for a little.

kinda feel like using these interactive tutorials as part of a wider constellation of instructional material is more useful than as a singular walled garden, like google a lot which is what u do when ur building a webiste irl, get a book, and most importantly work on an actual project, which i mean u do make actual websites so youve got that which the best learning environment

these learn 2 code exercise sites present such a small fraction of the actual issues u will encounter irl which is part of what makes them useful but also limits their effectiveness as a learning environment

yeah plan what you want to finish it and google every little roadblock til you get there imo

also read the documentation I found that stuff a lot more useful than college notes etc at times

like coding is not actual coding which is why ppl generally call it developing these days

i guess what's difficult for me is that i want to get past the basic "beginner's website" that they teach you to build and learn how to manipulate things in experimental ways.

i really like this guy geoffrey lillemon's stuff. he changes his website constantly and the most recent version is really difficult to use and loads slowly, but generally i like how his art is embedded into the website, the way the user interacts with it. there are all these layers of images (i don't know if they're videos or flash or what) and...it's hard to explain.

i just want to know what kinds of code he's using. i'd like to be barely proficient at them so i can have more freedom in making my own stuff without relying so heavily on others.

is it all just JS/CSS/HTML?

i guess the obv answer is that i need to be patient and just learn everything possible about the basic website so that i can deconstruct it? learn to crawl before you can walk/run, etc.

i just wish there was a codecademy module that went through all the things that are NOT recommended. like, autoplaying videos and music, creating strobe light effects that might damage the viewer's eyes and cause them to sue, making lines of text blend to each other and become unreadable. instead everything is like "now we're going to teach you how to make a very professional CV that any senior vice president would love!"

u can see if u inspect hes using some css animations and also loading some js files for... something - u shd email him and ask tho good chance if u show interest in his particular project hed be into talking about it, espcailly if u showed him the cool stuff u made, or he might have it up on github too

i'm guessing he'd never respond, heh. he's one of the few people who appear to have taken the net art thing to the next level and probably has loads of money and doesn't talk to strangers

or if hes to busy and bigtime to f w u track down some lesser collaborator, someone will have blogged or want to talk to u or have a github

when ppl do clever things they like to talk abt it is the assumption im working under

i have a friend who does similar stuff http://www.yellowandorange.com tho i think hes mostly video these days anyway id be happy to introduce u i think he has a show coming up maybe

that's really cool! that's exactly what i'm talking about. i'd love to meet him sometime, but i want to get a lot better at it myself first. i'd love to talk to these people when i share the same CS vocabulary, or at least parts of the same vocabulary.

oh but regardless if he has a show coming up let me know, it would be nice to meet you and to see his stuff in person

i cld just introduce u on facebook or w/e, i wldnt worry abt not having the right skills hes super nice and humble and im sure wld be happy to talk shop, tho u wld have to refriend me lmao

smdh at myself

ha i do actually remember thinking to myself i have already been obnoxious once toward zach today maybe i shdnt go in a second time but then i did

anyway dont worry ilx we r friends again

<3

for real let me know if you attend one of his shows anytime soon. i'm reading/watching this and like his stuff a lot so far.

cool will do, tbh i havent seen him in a few years but thats mostly a function of not being in new york and were not like super tight but id be cool to see his show and say hi

tho i might be totally imagining that he said he had a show coming up, but maybe we cld visit his studio or something

oh no wait here we go https://instagram.com/p/zOGmAbL3CT

cool, yeah i'd be up for going to the show for sure

cool man its on

i've been doing the web design courses w/ this - they're fun!