I just got home from teaching JavaScript to a room full of people who've never written a line of code in their life. This book is missing something critical that most intros to JavaScript overlook: How does the student set up the plumbing and run their code? It's amazing how much of a hump this is for many trying to get started. It also amazes me how oblivious most of us programmers are to it. "Just open Chrome Dev T…
I came here to write this exactly. This looks like a nice resource, the tone is friendly and inviting and the topics are introduced at a nice pace. Then I thought about my cousin who I've been trying to teach to program a bit. She's interested and she's smart, she understands how things work at a conceptual level and she can design an algorithm. But if I just give her some JS and ask her to run it she'll stare blankl…
Exactly. I know how to program, if programming means designing an algorithm to achieve a task and returning the result...but even though I'm most of the way through my CS program, I don't know how to do a lot of the stuff necessary to make that program useful in the real world. I know I'm missing that and I'm learning on my own, but I'm really bothered there hasn't been much emphasis so far on how to deploy the program in a real-world environment and integrate it with an ecosystem of programs, such that laypeople can use it. Algorithms and programming are only a small piece of the puzzle, and a lot of people won't have senior developers to guide them.