codeX February 2015

A big welcome to Project codeX!

We hope that you will enjoy this journey with us and that you will learn and apply lots of new skills in the process. Arriving at codeX you might wonder where the class rooms are? There are none! It is just you, your fellow coders, us your mentors and the BIG world wide web.

Assumptions

This introduction assumes that you have completed both these courses in Codecademy:

If you haven't completed them yet it's not a train smash! Just complete them before you go any further.

Now what?

After completing all those courses in Codecademy you must be feeling quite chuffed with yourself - and with good reason! You put in the hours, you argued your way through the challenges and you have the badges to show. Now we are going to remove the side wheels, so things might start feeling a bit unstable. You will be unsure on what code to use where, but this is all pretty normal.

Just to prove to you that you are not alone in see this quickly. It's quite a long, but interesting read.

So now you know that you are not alone let's get going.

Overview

Register

So we would like you to register for a few online tools that we will be using at codeX.

Please register and familiarise yourself with:

You should spend about 10 mins on each site, seeing out what each does and checking out the different features.

Tools of the trade

Next steps are to get going with a few tools. Work your way through each of these exercises - they're challenging but rewarding!

Let's code

So far most of the code you have written might have been inside of Codecademy, that is about to change!

In reality most software is written in text editors or a more adanced text editor called an Integrated Development Environment or IDE for short. We will use a text editor called Sublime Text and later you will be introduced to an IDE called Eclipse.

  • Learn how to find problems in you code using Debugging & Tools
  • Let get going and [do some coding now] (lets_code.md)

Katas using 53 functions

Now head over to 53 functions and write some functions

Javascript on the command line

So far all the Javascript that you've written was running inside of the web browser. By using node js (or node just for short) you can run javascript programs from the terminal, without the need for a web browser. This allows you to use Javascript to write some programs that don't depend on the web browser - for example, accessing data in a database. Soon we will be using it to program web servers and even to do some robotics.