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

is it supposed to be an if else? two ifs? two fors? couldn't all of those work if I formatted it correctly?

"else if" rather than "if else" should do it.

syntactically it's:

if ( )

else if ( )

else if ( )

else ( )

That's the one.

Or, well, that works for FizzBuzz, but if you're still stuck on Buzz you want:

if ()

else if ()

else ()

This is good fun, FizzBuzz was the first one I feel like I've actually solved through thinking rather than just arbitrarily moving { around until it just works (used nested if to fix it)

It hurts my brain a bit that on my screen { and ( are almost indistinguishable, and it took me ages of c+ping before I realised the % is just the percent sign.

ah got it, it was just one } that was haunting me

i hope they keep putting out lessons all year. so far they only have 3 up, and i can't imagine it's a breeze to make a new lesson every week.

from the looks of it it's an actual startup w/ people who work there

so I'm guessing they're more concerned about keeping the traffic after week one + making the lessons is the easy part

it can be hard to see but if you click next to a { or } it will highlight its mate (and i think highlight red if it doesn't have one).

oh that's nifty

oh that's nifty

really interesting to see that theyre using triple equals so early on.. i code for a living and i'm still not completely clear on the difference between == and === in javascript

yah they just said == can occasionally cause problems?

I think that's a deliberate policy to get people in the habit of using === unless they're absolutely sure they want ==, which can cause some hard-to-find bugs

a lot of JS tutorials seem to be doing that now (I last used JS in like 2003 but decided to brush up on the basics a bit last year to do some HTML5 Canvas stuff)

quite tempted to try this tonight instead of doing some homework which is due tomorrow

(I also code for a living but my skills are very out of date and I'm stuck in an obscure (not difficult, just not resulting in any transferrable skills) rut at work. I can either be scared of this when in 5 weeks' time there are 250,000 new people who know just as much as I've been getting by on in paid jobs for a decade - and yes, I do think that's possible - or I can at least look at it myself...)

it's pretty good, I really like the site and its mission. Granted, I already know basic programming, but I'm curious to see how far this goes.

ok, I've never heard of === before, is it just a Javascript thing?

*Checks Wikipedia*

Aha, I see: The languages JavaScript and PHP extends this syntax, with the "==" operator able to return true if two values are equal, even if they have different types (for example, "4 == "4"" is true), and the "===" operator returning true only if two values are equal and have equivalent types as well (such that "4 === "4"" is false but "4 === 4" is true).

huh, i thought == checked for type as well

i couldn't figure out the && thing, so i just used i % 15 = 0. kinda felt like i was cheating.

i will admit to feeling legitimately proud of myself when i was able to make fizzbuzz work for a variable that you enter. looking forward to the next lesson...

well the prob is you haven't covered 45 and 60 and 90 and stuff!

just make a separate if statement that looks like

if ( i % 3 === 0 && i & 5 === 0)

put it before the fizz and buzz statements, and make them else if statements. i think that's how i did it. i rewrote it to use nesting later.

oops that last & should be a %

oops that last & should be a %

Wait, is the thing of not covering 45 etc directed at ytth? Because those numbers are divisible by 15, so they should come up as FizzBuzz.

Has everyone else had a go at the Java courses? Haven't had time to look at those.

i went back and played around with it after reading the thread and was able to make it work with the &&. but yeah, emil.y is right - if it's divisible by 3 and 5, then it will be divisible by 15, so the program told me i had done it right - i just felt like there was a more elegant way.

i did the 'functions in javascript' course, but i didn't like it - it seemed like a refresher that would be good for someone that was already familiar with this, but just needed some tips on how to avoid bugs in their code.

oh yeah; i suck at math

doing this from scratch - i learned a little C++ about ten years ago and lol HTMl at around the same time but i'm half considering taking courses so hopefully this gives me half an idea what i'm in for

Had a rough week but was able to finish the first lessons this morning. It was okay; I haven't done much beyond basic html before (unless you count basic and logo back in grade school), and this made some sense. Felt more like I was parroting than learning, but it was only week 1.

yeah, tbh i felt like i was filling in blanks but couldn't write the same code from scratch or anything- i may go over the first lessons again.

finished for this week!

it's def getting harder

If I want to recommend this to people how exactly do I do it? Like, just point them to the courses page, or is there a separate week-by-week thing?

Wait wait nevermind it's codeyear not codeacademy! Got it.

Did first half today. Dice game this week?

i am finding bits of this insanely confusing - in lesson 5 of "functions in javascript" there's this bit where you're supposed to look at the code and predict the answer and though i knew the likely answer i just couldn't work out what the code was doing to get it

i.e. how does

var result = 1;
for (var i = 0; i < exponent; i++) {
  result = result * base; }
return result ;

even work?

like: if you have defined result as 1, what enables it to recognise that 'result' is capable of being a number that is not 1?
would it break if you changed the fourth line of the above to

result * base = result;

result is a variable (hence "var") which means its value can change.

it would break if you changed the fourth line, not because of maths but because of the syntax of assigning a value - you can't assign a value to an expression like that.

i.e. the interpreter will read the line left to right, syntax being variable = expression, not the other way round.

ok, that does help.

another reason the above flummoxed me utterly: it took me forever to remember what 'i' was (i kept thinking 'integer', which is not useful).

tbh I don't much like this syntax

for (var i = 0; i < exponent; i++) {

Legacy syntax derived from C.

Loosely speaking, being on the left-hand side (LHS) of the "=" in an assignment and being on the right (RHS) mean very different things. The RHS is used to compute a value (e.g. the current value of result multiplied by the current value of base) and the variable on the LHS is updated to take that value. The value of the LHS before the assignment plays no role at all, and it doesn't make sense to put result * base on the LHS because that's not a variable you can assign a value to.

i did the functions lesson and new york, new york thing yesterday. trying to catch back up this week.

mostly it went well, i'm a little confused about using return within a function to check if a condition is true or not but that's ok.

this week starts with a really great review of all topics. it helped clarify a bunch of things for me.

So I'm doing this. I took poorly taught C++ classes in high school (and basically haven't used it since), so a lot of the stuff is pretty familiar so far. JavaScript does seem pretty loosey-goosey with variable types. Using + in console.log() to combine strings and numerical variables really bugs me.

whoa u guys hi

i am now in

man i've been scratching the surface of python the last couple of weeks and i just realized i was trying to solve the first question in python

lol

Do it in both and examine how your solutions differ!

I haven't looked at this really but I am following this thread and will try to answer questions ppl have.

My day job is Python, among other things. If you get stuck on anything I can probably help out.

Woo. Finished the dice game. I think they're becoming much better at explaining concepts and teaching the material. Last week was a mess but this week was really intuitive and even fun.

Now, I did the dice game by using if/else statements (which is how they want you to do it). Can you do it using 'switch' cases tho?

err I'm getting on this tonight, I swear

IM me if you need help... just did the Startup project too.

haha yeah I prob will, getting stuck on one thing killed my momentum

I think I used switch for the dice game. Definitely used it for something this week that was expecting if/else. I like doing the tasks in a different way to the one asked for, to see what the checker does and doesn't find acceptable.

I'd be interested to see the back-end for the checker - it's clearly not just checking the output, but it's happy for things to be done in different ways. Dunno if each exercise has a list of automated test values or if it's doing something more clever that I might understand if I hadn't slept through compilers class. (end geeky side-note)

(I write Perl and, ahem, Excel VBA for a living, but dabble with more closely javascript-resembling languages occasionally in my spare time for graphical tinkering, though it will not be many more weeks before my knowledge of JS itself is exhausted)

> Now, I did the dice game by using if/else statements (which is how they want you to do it). Can you do it using 'switch' cases tho?

you can't really use switch for comparing a variable against another variable (for checking the doubles) - the case values have to be known at compile time. ifs are better here.

(there might be more to the dice project that i missed - i only skimmed it)

That's what I was thinking. I couldn't figure out how to get it to evaluate the relationship between the two dice rolls.

finished this weeks - building the blackjack game was fun, but some of the planning stuff was a little wonky. little bugs here and there...

also, it seems like there are odds problems with the way they have it set up since you have an equal chance of getting a face card and getting, say, a '9' card, when getting a card that equals '10' should happen 4 times more often than getting one that equals '9'

haha the thought of doing something like that intimidates me, is it pretty step by step?

yes, definitely

i think there are positive and negative aspects w/ this as a learning style. individual things seem easier to learn, but it's hard to keep them together in your head. I think they could benefit from mixing up the lesson styles. maybe have one part that's just super repetitive to get stuff in your head like math problems, another part where you really have no guidance and it's a bigger puzzle, etc.

like, why not throw a video lecture in? etc.

nobody in the world has any idea how to teach programming. There is a big computer science education conference every year where CS profs get together and propose new and different ways of teaching programming. Software engineers complain that people graduate with CS degrees without knowing how to work on a big project. People who learned to program entirely on their own and never went to college assume that everybody should be able to do the same. It's just really hard to learn and really hard to teach if you're not predisposed to it.

so presumably these folks just guessed a way of teaching it like everybody else and decided to see if it works

iatee, have u started week 3 yet? the whole beginning is crunchy review stuff

yeah I can see how it's a subject that would be particularly difficult to teach, as it's like midway between learning a language and learning a skill
xp
yeah I'm on that atm

To learn to program you have to learn the syntax of some made-up language designed to be interpreted by robots as well as how to use an assortment of tools that can be aggressively unfriendly just to be able to do the part where you make the computer do things. To really deeply learn how to program you have to internalize a somewhat daunting set of abstract concepts and how they fit together, along with even more details of the made-up robot language so that when the time comes to turn the structure in your head into code you do it in a way that makes sense and isn't tortured.

Here I"ll say something encouraging though: it is totally possible to learn to program; my best guess is that to learn, it is necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) to do a whole lot of it, and you have to start trying to work on things you actually want to make as soon as possible. The next time you are about to do some inane repetitive task on your computer, consider whether you know enough about programming to automate that task. Or just try to automate it. The first time you spend ten minutes writing a script to save yourself thirty minutes of changing filenames one at a time, you're a programmer. The first time you spend two hours writing a script to save yourself thirty minutes doing something, you're a guru.

employment-wise it seems like it would be a good idea to learn vba, tho programmers seem to hate that for some reason?

It's sort of one of those things where like a lot of small businesses used to (or still, ye gods) run on the back of an Excel spreadsheet or Access database with a bunch of VBA spaghetti logic inside it that someone wrote in the misty past. This person also usually failed to document what was happening and then died. At least such is the folklore. So it's not exactly a "growth technology" I shouldn't think, but if you find yourself in a place where everything depends on keeping an ancient Windows 98 machine with the critical business app on it alive, you might save the day with VBA. But you could save the day better in most of these cases by, like, signing up for Salesforce or something.

ah that makes sense

so the real answer is, learn whatever tool is best-suited for something you need or want to do *right now*. JavaScript is built in to every web browser, so Code Year doesn't have to do any weird server-side trickery to let you program in it. And as a beginner, JavaScript is really well-suited for creating neat little interactive things using a web page as your canvas. If what you want to do right now is just start programming, go with whatever seems sufficiently easy, fun, well-guided, gamified, whatever.

also, it seems like there are odds problems with the way they have it set up since you have an equal chance of getting a face card and getting, say, a '9' card, when getting a card that equals '10' should happen 4 times more often than getting one that equals '9'

i thought what they did seemed okay. you're getting a random 1-52 number moldulo 13, and then 0, 11, and 12 are all face cards and 10 is a 10 card. You end up with 16 "cards" that can give you a value of 10 and 4 that can give you a value of 9.

they did still have the program dealing both cards from a full deck instead of the first from a full deck and the second from a deck with the 1st card taken out. but then it'd be more complicated and they're probably saving that for another week.

> they did still have the program dealing both cards from a full deck

but that's ok - think of the shoes in vegas that hold multiple decks...

I completely forgot this was still on this week.

I do some VBA at work and I'd say there isn't much of a job market for just doing VBA, but in a general office IT job you can get people to look at you like you have magical powers if you can roll a macro to stick 30 spreadsheets together, or just know your way round worksheet formulae (not even VBA!) to any extent.

There used to be Access SQL+VBA jobs around but I think a lot of people are now going with e.g. MySQL and a simple web framework for the minor database tasks they would once have used Access for. The only Excel VBA jobs I see are for financial work in city jobs, but financial number-wrangling I know v. little about and it has 0 interest to me, plus I suspect city finance firms are shitty to work for in a non-financial role, so I've never really looked into those.

I hearrrd MS is talking about completely replacing VBA with something else anyway but I forget which grapevine that came from.

it is totally possible to learn to program

I am living testament -- got my BA in English, now working as a programmer (though not yet a software engineer).

it's still really early in the year, but so far codecademy is making me feel like i made a mistake not doing comp sci in college.

The first time you spend two hours writing a script to save yourself thirty minutes doing something, you're a guru.

<3 this

ya

i'm being advised that if i'm to start at all i'm to start with either c# or html5 anyone with any thoughts care to share em?

C# and HTML5 are v different things afaik - do you want to code or do you want to make webpages?

Others are better placed than I to comment, but I've never seen a job ad that specifies knowledge of C# as opposed to a more common language like C/C++ or Java. I don't know what penetration it has in industry. That said, a lot of what you learn in one language will transfer over to others and make them easier to pick up.

the recommender is a very highly paid IT professional who's been on at me for some years now to take the plunge, tbh i don't know what he has in mind for me i think he just pities me and wants to employ me

C# is Microsoft's object-oriented superset of C for the .net framework, like Objective-C is for Mac and iOS development. So it is useful for developing applications for Windows, pretty much.

HTML 5 refers to the most recent specification for the markup language that Web pages are built with, and by metonymy serves as a brand of sorts for a bunch of recent developments in Web standards designed to make it easier to build rich client side Web applications without the use of proprietary extensions like Flash or Silverlight. HTML per se isn't a programming language.

what silby said.

i'd go for something more cross-platform. probably java (which i think still has a lot of life in it, despite oracle's recent efforts). probably not c, which i grew up on, but which lacks things like hashes which java has a standard library for. and not c++ or c# due to learning curve.

as for scripting languages, which is slightly different, people here swear by python, but i hate the forced indenting and lack of markers for the ends of blocks. i prefer php (as i'm an old c programmer) for anything that i can't do in bash.

javascript is a good choice to learn with - available everywhere, easy to see results. lacks a decent debugger though.

heh i can't even understand the answers but thanks

There are tons of jobs for C# programmers in London, dunno about elsewhere. I've done a bit of work with it but I generally prefer Python unless it makes specific sense to use C# (e.g. SQL Server CLR functions)

I <3 forced indenting though

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

^ this book is awesome

javascript is a good choice to learn with - available everywhere, easy to see results. lacks a decent debugger though.

Do you need a full-fledged debugger though? For most development purposes, I get by fine with Firefox + Firebug. (Then, I'm hardly a JS jockey.)

I think I hit the "okay, bored now" point of this by the end of the second course

Reminds me as usual that while i love the power of programming, the nitty gritty - figuring out why this parentheses or that equal sign is missing somewhere - even with the debugger - is always such a drag

That comment about Excel macros above is like super otm, though

the 2nd course is poorly designed compared to the rest. there have def been a lot of improvements. I can see this site being a pretty big success story eventually and this early run as being 'lol we didn't know what we were doing'

yay, new week of stuff. (really the only thing making my Mondays tolerable at this moment.)

so, besides iatee + me, which other ilxors are still doing this?

i'm two wks behind now but i really do want to get back on track!

still on this, hope to look at this week's in an hour or two

if i keep this thread bookmarked it's good harassment--i've done most of conditionals in the last 45 mins.

still on this, hope to look at this week's in an hour or two
― Schleimpilz im Labyrinth (a passing spacecadet), Monday, 6 February 2012 20:28 (1 hour ago)

still on this, hope to look at this week's... tomorrow

For anyone who has done Building an Address Book, I solved 1.6 by doing this with the prompts at the end:

add(prompt("First Name?"), prompt("Last Name?"), prompt("Email?"), prompt("Telephone?"));

It worked, but I notice that the hints suggest:

You can use the following syntax with the prompt function: var <response> = prompt(question);

And everyone else who did it in the Q&A did it like the hints suggest, ie: by creating 4 variables using prompts and then calling those 4 variables in the add statement. My question is: Is the way I did it legitimate (It did work), or is it just a bug in the program that let it work and that kind of coding shouldn't actually be valid?

Do you know why your way works?

Well, I know why I tried it thinking it might work. The prompt calls for an answer that becomes the parameter for the function. I just figured that instead of defining a bunch of variables as prompts and then running the function, I could just put the variables directly in the parameters.

(And it did seem to work the way I intended it to.)

I think my explanation there was really ineloquent but hopefully you understand what I'm trying to say.

So given that it works what makes you suspicious?

No one else doing the exercise seems to have arrived at that solution, and the designers seem to have intended a different solution.

Well if that's all then no you didn't do anything wrong per se by doing it the way that you did. There are situations where it would be "bad style" to do it that way probably, and there might even be programming languages where that wouldn't work, but using the results of function calls directly as function parameters is legit!

Thought experiment: what are some ways your solution could go wrong if JavaScript functions worked differently than they do?

this week was def a step up in difficulty

I think this site will be a major success

woo. done this week.

2.4 this week is giving me a "That's correct!" but no "Next Exercise", grr.

Sort of feeling my patience wearing a bit thin. I think I find Javascript's syntax for object-oriented stuff a bit confusing, maybe because I've dabbled a (very) little w/Java but haven't really done any serious OO work. Interested to know if this makes more sense to people who are new to programming.

Dunno if it's because of that or because of the drip-learning method and not looking at it for a week in between but I feel like every time I'm only just remembering enough to scrape together the one or two lines required for each task and couldn't actually put together any real code on my own.

On the other hand, the big secret of programming and the only reason I get paid is you can go a surprisingly long way on not knowing what you're doing but kludging it together line by line until it compiles and you think "I wasn't expecting this to work yet, but it's giving me the right answers".

the entire secret to writing code is to redefine the problem into its smallest, simplest units, write those, and then start combining things logically until voila! you have a program

if you can think/design in those terms, things become less daunting

(Actually I've just noticed it's ticked my 2.4 anyway so I may as well just manually go to the next section. Still feeling kind of joyless this week but maybe that's just me.)

I think what first drew me to programming is that I have a very can't-see-wood-for-trees approach: I like building things up line by line and being surprised when I have a forest because, oh, I was totally expecting to have to put some weevils under that fungus, does it really look like a forest already?

but it turns out that when people want to pay you for programming, or when you just want something that does more than amuse you and you alone for an hour or two, you need to look at it from the other end too: the boss wants a forest, what 4 main sections does it need? where are the paths between them? etc. and that's the part I'm not so good at.

also, the part where every year you have to spend your free time learning how to burn your forest down and start over with this year's new, hip kind of trees, because if you neglect to do that for 3 years running you're unemployable.

(I'm not good at metaphors either, you may have noticed)

totally expecting to have to put some weevils under that fungus, does it really look like a forest already?

this might not make sense, so: most of my day job is munging sets of data input by bored, inconsistent humans, and I have SO many times thought "ok, if I do x and y it'll work on 95% of my data, and then I'll need fiddly special case z", and I've done a first pass with x and y only to find that that does in fact cover everything, special case z does not exist in my million records

I realise that if I was building software for anyone else to use all the special cases need covered, because one day someone's going to press the buttons in the wrong order and lose a day's work

(but it's not just a data-wrangling thing, either - when I was a kid I started a crappy 2d platform game, and when I put the jumping code in I just went "uhh for now I'll increment y every frame for 20 frames, then I'll decrement it again, and that's going to suck, but I'll take a look at it before I start worrying about parabolas", but it turned out to have a perfectly adequate jump-feel as it was)

sorry for tl;dr, will shut up and go to bed now

(Chucky Egg did well enough using the increment / decrement thing iirc. and Manic Miner's parabolic jumps looked great but were annoyingly 1 pixel slower than walking)

oh my god so buggy this week. typos, poorly explained lessons, and on 6:2 in recursion you have to reload your browser to get the proper code to work. WTF.

I didn't have that with 6:2 but I can't get it to OK my final code on the new dice game project even though I'm fairly sure it's doing the right thing

not liking this week's dice game, the instructions are hard to follow and the pre-written code is formatted in a really horrible way with extra line breaks and different tab stops all over the place

I mean I realise that my score on this is basically a meaningless number, damn my completist need to have 100% on every course

i now have two projects that aren't at 100% bc it doesn't clear like one or two lessons. driving me OCD-crazy

update: in my quest for completeness I copied someone else's code from the Q&A section, except I didn't realise they'd replaced all the <s with LESS_THAN to get through the Q&A html rewriter, so it didn't run and gave me a syntax error... and the green tick I wanted

ffffuuuu etc

ok, for that OCD green tick, it looks like you can clear all the code in the final part of the project and hit run with a blank code window and get a "That's correct!"

I suggest you put your code in the clipboard before doing so just in case I'm wrong, of course

I would just like to be Uncle No-Fun and point out that if you ever find yourself in the real world typing (as you do in this week's assignment)

myVariable -= 0.1;

(because computers store everything as binary, they're OK with fractions where the bottom half is a power of 2. so a half is fine, three quarters is fine, five eighths, nine sixteenths: all OK. but they can't build up a tenth out of those fractions, the best they can do is add up ever more teeny fractions with a power of two on the bottom to get something approximately the same as 1/10.

that's probably OK if you just want to store 0.1 now, because the discrepancy is very tiny and the computer will brush it under the carpet and not tell you, but once you start repeatedly adding and subtracting 0.1s the difference gets bigger and bigger until you have a "rounding error" and suddenly all your sums are wrong or a loop doesn't finish when you think it's going to, etc.

yeah, that was quite boring. but, just saying.)

(i actually had something very similar last night - adding items to a TreeSet and it thinking .99903 and .99904 were the same thing and refusing to add the second item (or replacing the first with the second or whatever it does. wasn't drawing one of my squares is all i know). i ended up multiplying everything by 10000. fixed point for the win...)

Is anyone still doing this? I just started it today - I've been at a new job for 3 weeks now and I have to get into Javascript (and CSS/HTML5/PHP and other webby stuff I have no idea about) so I figured I should do this in my spare time to get up to speed a bit.

In the Time Trials project there's an exercise where they change:

  var totalTime = 0;
  for ( i = 0; i < raceTimes.length; i++ ) {
    totalTime = totalTime + raceTimes(square bracket)i(square bracket);
  }

to:

  for ( i = 0; i < raceTimes.length; i++ ) {
    var totalTime = (totalTime || 0) + raceTimes(square bracket)i(square bracket);
  }

saying it's cleaner and more efficient. This seems wrong to me, cleaner is arguable but how is it more efficient? Surely it's less efficient to have to do "or with 0" every time it loops than to not do that? Am I missing something?

i would always use the former. and += in the loop.

that var in the second one just looks like a scope error to me.

It looks like trying to be clever just to use fewer lines of code.

yeah, that second bit of code is just ridiculous. it's good that youre already able to catch stuff like that

if i were trying to be clever and save 1 line of code, i'd write it like this:

for ( var i = 0, totalTime = 0; i < raceTimes.length; i++ )
{
    totalTime += raceTimes［i］;
}

that var in the second one just looks like a scope error to me.

I thought that at first but javascript doesn't have block scope, only function-level scope

and I can see absolutely no reason why their code is efficient or anything other than horribly ugly

(re "is anyone still doing this", I did half of last week's and like 20% of this week's and am wondering if I can be bothered any more)

Second one might be marginally faster, but trying to wring every ounce of speed out of a piece of Javascript isn't worth it. If execution speed was the main issue, you wouldn't be using Javascript in the first place. And it makes the code harder to read, never a good thing.

> but javascript doesn't have block scope, only function-level scope

ok, didn't know that.

but it feels a lot like they are teaching javascript specific stuff that'll fall over in other languages and i think that's a bad idea.

(fwiw i don't like the initialisation (or incrementing) of anything other than the loop index in the for() - too easy to overlook. plus the mix of , and ; bugs me)

and i'd save a line of code by having the { on the same line as the for 8)

(but only in java / javascript, in c (c++ / php) i'd have it as you have. lots of personal preferences, not all of which i can explain)

I am slowly converting myself from { on the next line to on the same line. Don't really know why, especially when I held out from it even when I was writing a little Expect/tcl on the side, which will actually not sodding work if you put the braces on a new line and will give a super-cryptic error message to boot.

still don't like
} else {
but it doesn't really leave you any other option, so

(I mostly write Perl when I am not writing VBA, which doesn't have block braces, or swearing at Codecademy)

{ on next line till i die

makes brace matching a cinch (i suppose some smartarse will suggest i shouldn't be nesting that many braces) plus the extra white space makes things more readable imo.

{ on the next line, because it makes braced languages look more like white-spaced languages, and therefore easier to pick out blocks/see scopes by eye.

i spent way too much time today getting a deck object for blackjack to work. finally realized that splice always returns an array, and trying to treat the one-element array that i was getting like the object contained within it was what was giving me all the errors.

is there one of these for iOS? gonna make a fb-integrated pictionary rip and ship it for $200mil to zyngas

good idea

i just tore through the html exercises to refresh my memory, took me all of 15 minutes. css is apparently forthcoming, could use that refresher too.

in the meantime javascript has taken a backseat to SQL, which is the one that might get me hired given what i'm shooting for.

1. Further to discussion upthread, found this about why it's a good idea to get in the habit of keeping the { on the same line as preceding code in javascript: [Removed Illegal Link]/
(if anyone is going to say that this makes JS a pretty lousy language, along with tcl which I was complaining about upthread for the same reason, well, yeah)

2. I am two weeks behind on codecademy, have I missed anything or just another 4 versions of the same old recursive function tutorials?

3. I signed up for udacity's CS101 which has just restarted for a new semester with (apparently?) no deadlines this time around, because I wanted to learn Python, and holy hell does this seem time-consuming - each week's unit is 40 short videos plus 20 multiple choice questions plus homework, and even though the videos are all only 1-5 minutes long and we haven't covered anything I didn't already know yet, it took me all afternoon to watch the first half of week 1's videos

(I was waiting for an email and, OK, ILXing a little in between videos, but still)

what do you want to know re: python?

Bah, let's try that link again: [Removed Illegal Link]/

Philip: nothing specific really, I mainly just felt like dabbling. I write Perl for a living now, as does most of the team I'm in, and Perl obviously has a reputation as kind of old-fashioned, and the other dev team here uses mostly Python, so that's the most obvious new language to look at.

Yes, there are lots of books and ebooks and online tutorials, and I've bookmarked and downloaded probably tens of them already and never read them, so I thought having videos beamed into my home weekly might motivate me to do something...

(Also I liked the idea of building a search engine. I probably could build a basic one in a super-kludgy and horrible way in Perl, but I assume the course is going to do it in a much neater way.)

[Removed Illegal Link]/

[Removed Illegal Link]

I have no idea what is wrong with the link. http://bit.ly/I0h90Z ?

"Placing opening braces on the same line as their corresponding control statements like that is called K&R style."

that's exactly wrong, and the link he puts on 'K&R' says as much

oh, ok, in the third example they mention "Variant: 1TBS"

I write Python for a living, but I learned it on the job, so I haven't any experience in tutorials as such, but some people seem to like "Learn Python The Hard Way".

spacecadet, if you know perl, python will be a breeze. an easy project I'd suggest is making a CGI script that reads in an ILX page and replaces all instances of the word 'DUMPLINGS!' with something else. check pleac.sf.net for python versions of things you are familiar with in perl

Also doing the udacity thing, v intrigued by their stated goal of the learning equiv of a CS degree.

i haven't checked it out, but most CS programs don't teach you very much programming, so...

do people really stick with this?

it gets frustrating pretty fast

what's wrong with this code?

for (var i=100; i<=150; i++)
var square = i*i
if (i % 2 = 0)
{console.log(i);}
else
{console.log(square);}

something fishy on line 3

i want even numbers 100-150 and squares of odd numbers 100-150

100, 10201, 102, 10609, etc

Probably should be if i % 2 == 0.

Or strictly === 0

ah i forgot about those fucking ========

8======>

why don't they have a sidebar that says

"parts u will need: {, %, ==, etc" so i don't have to root around like a pig for answers in forums

took me long enough to remember the modulo

The for loop also needs braces.

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!