Thursday, October 31, 2013

Holloween class recap & Homework assignment

Thanks all who came to the Halloween class! I know you have a lot going on with your other classes, and with life in general, and probably Halloween in particular, so it is an honor to have you show up for an "optional" class about I subject I love.

Today we did some CSS layout exercises. We started with an undecorated sample resume (http://bit.ly/1dUTtzy) and over the course of the class we used the plunkr environment to turn it into something that looked decent.  We worked with CSS properties like font-size, font-weight, text-align, margin-bottom, margin-top, margin-left, margin-right and a few other things. We discussed the difference between using "em" and "px" for setting the font size and we create an anchor that used an "email href". There are many ways to do the same thing and we did a couple of small experiments to demonstrate that.

The homework assignment is to use the same CSS techniques we practiced in class to make the U.S. Constitution have a nice presentation. The link to the homework is below:

http://bit.ly/17vQMml

Doing this work should help cement the concepts and techniques we went through in class. Please post a link to your plunkr solution here on the blog. If you missed class, try to do it anyway. We're here to help...and remember you can always GTS!

Today we handed out a few $1 bills for laughs. Who knows, maybe next class I'll hand out $5 bills. Let you classmates who have been ditching class know they may not only be missing out on learning so lucrative skills, but they may be missing out on cash prizes ;)

I really love programming and development of all kinds (web, server, embedded systems). It is a lot of fun once you get going with it and people actually pay you good money to do it! Pretty fricking amazing! Anyway, love having you come to class and hope to see you all really develop your developer chops over the next couple months.

Have a great weekend!

-Dan

Monday, October 28, 2013

Exercise Day

We walked through two sample Google Chrome extensions.  The first one is called One-click Kittens and is described in Getting Started: Building a Chrome Extension.  We all created a Folder called ChromeExt on the Desktop and put the four files for One-click Kittens in the folder. We followed the instructions on the page getting started page for loading the chrome extension.

Then we briefly went over a few different types of Chrome Extensions on the Chrome Extensions Overview page.

  • Browser extensions
    • Always available
  • Page extensions
    • Only appear for specific web page
  • Content extensions
    • Can change the content of a web page every time it is loaded

One-click Kittens is a browser extension.  The most interesting are content extensions which can be used to automatically change the content of pages, to highlight things or remove things.

Finally, we walked through another browser extension sample called Page Redder described on the Sample Extensions.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

CSS Next Steps

Good class tonight gang.  Could everyone send an email from their GMAIL ACCOUNT with their name and a picture profile picture to Derek.Dunnom@Gmail.com?  Would help to remember names, plus we need to get all your email addresses so we can send updates and give you access to the curriculum document.

Someone asked for the plunker url, here it is: plnkr.co

Here are the slides for class.  PLEASE SAVE YOUR PLUNKS AND PASTE THEM AS A RESPONSE TO THIS BLOG POST.  You will be doing this for homework for the rest of the class.  As always, post if there are any questions OR feedback for the instructors.

Friday, October 11, 2013

CSS

Sorry for the late posting! On Thursday we covered the remainder of the Lists & Tables lesson from Monday, and introduced CSS.
When coding up your CSS, remember to pay close attention to the brackets - { and } - and the semicolons at the end of each setting. CSS is much stricter on its syntax than HTML is!
To see some further examples of CSS, open up the Chrome Developer Tools and go to the Elements tab (leftmost). In the right pane you'll see all the CSS for the various elements on the page!

Monday, October 7, 2013

Lists & Tables

Great third day! You all picked up lists and tables very quickly. Sorry we didn't have enough time to do the second exercise, so consider this your homework: Read the slides and perform Table Exercises 1 & 2. If you get stuck, the HTML for each is in the notes of the exercise slide (check the gear button). See you guys on Thursday!

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Nerds who care introduction class

Welcome to the second day of class.  Kris, JD and Derek are excited to meet the students and get them set up for the coming semester.  Today will be more about setting up your development environment online and making sure you have access to the tools you need. Here are the slides for reference