Introduction to JavaScript Programming Introduction

Transcript from the "Introduction" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> Kyle Simpson: It is a fantastic honor to be back for, as he said, the fourth time. Frontend Masters is, holds kind of a special place in my heart, I've said this before, I think, on my other videos. But almost three years ago, when I was moving from being a developer into being a teacher, I had gone independent.

[00:00:19] But I was moving to become a developer, I mean to become a teacher from having been a consultant and developer, and I was kind of trying to get into this teaching thing. Or at least had thought about this teaching thing, and it was fortuitous that at that same point in time Mark reached out to me sort of unbeknownest.

[00:00:36] I hadn't really known him or followed a lot of his stuff. I had heard a little bit, but not a lot. And he reached out and asked if I would want to come up and teach a workshop, and that was sort of sight unseen I hadn't done formal teaching like that before.

[00:00:50] Certainly done a lot of conference speaking but teaching is quite a bit different and so I credit Mark for giving me my start if you will, in this whole teaching thing, and now, three years later that's what I do for a living full time. I travel all over the world teaching about JavaScript and related things.

[00:01:06] And so I owe a lot of that start to Mark and I appreciate it and definitely am honored to be back. So today, and I wanna just take a few moment before I even sort of officially get started just to kind of level some expectations. Mark already kind of mentioned this but I wanna make sure everybody's on the same page.

[00:01:26] This is a change of pace from what I typically teach but I think it's every bit as important if not more important that we teach from this perspective. And I think there are lots and lots of great materials, there are great books, there are great blogs, there are great websites out there.

[00:01:42] I have recommended many of them before. There is a fantastic website called JavaScript for cats, jsforcats.com. If you haven't checked that out, it's a fantastic website by a really smart dude named Max Augden. And then there's great books on the topic. Like for example I think a really good book once you've gotten at least somewhat of a foundation with JavaScript and you wanna go further.

[00:02:06] I think a great book is Eloquent JavaScript, and that's a really great place to start. So there's lots of resources, I'll probably spend lots and lots of time talking to you about the different resources that I've found and that I believe in and endorse. But one thing that I think has been a little bit lacking, and that's kind of why I was so insistent on wanting to do this part of this workshop today.

[00:02:28] Is a lot of times they start with an assumption that you already understand the concept of what a variable is, or what a function is, or what a loop actually means. In fact with my own book series, which I'll talk about in just a moment, I kind of made that assumption.

[00:02:44] I made the assumption that there was this cliff that you showed up to the books already knowing something about programming. And I got a lot of feedback from people saying hey this sounds great. Books are really cool. But I wasn't ready for them yet. I needed something else first.

[00:03:00] And so long after I have already started that book series, I went back and said well what could I do to create that footbridge. What could I do to help people get up and going, and I decided to write the book for the book series called Up and Going.

[00:03:13] So for this first half of our discussion for this discussion that we're going to go through in the next couple of hours, the goal is to go through that book content. It's a rather short book, about 60 or 70 printed pages worth of book content. But it starts from assumption of no programming experience at all, talking about the basics, like even what a code editor is.

[00:03:36] So if you're watching this, and you feel like that's too basic for you, I promise that as we progress we get more and more into it. And we'll pick you up somewhere along the way so don't feel too bored or too tune me out. But we don't wanna lose people.

[00:03:49] If you've shown up today or to this video, if you've show up and you don't have anything I wanted to make sure, if there wasn't another resource that had ever done this I wanted to make sure to provide that resource for you. So both in written form certainly go over the book, because we will go over that and that is essentially the written form of this part of today's workshop.

[00:04:08] But I also encourage you to check out all those other resources that i was mentioning too, and you kinda put all of these different pieces together and get a good foundation of programming. It is much more important to get a foundation in programming than I think a lot of people give credit to.

[00:04:23] I started programming when I was a teenager, way back in the early 90s and I didn't have any kind of formal education. And I figured it out the hard way, and when I came back later and did formal education, I had to relearn an awful lot of stuff.

[00:04:38] And I'd like to encourage you not to necessarily take that path of learning it the wrong way over and over and over and eventually finally picking it up the right way. It's a good idea to get those good foundations, so even though it may not look super impressive on a resume to say I took an intro programming course or whatever.

[00:04:55] That's really, really important. I'm willing to bet, even if you have some programming experience, you know, for instance, what a loop is. I think when we start to talk about loops, you may see that there's some slightly different concepts related to loops than maybe you've seen before. Maybe you've only thought about it as a syntax, and not as a concept.

[00:05:12] So even for the experienced programmer, I think there's little tidbits here that can kind of tweak your mindset a little bit, and that's really the goal, is to make sure that that foundation is as firm as possible, so that all the other stuff that we do makes sense.

[00:05:25] So as we go throughout the rest of the content material through both halves of today, and the other courses tomorrow, we'll progressively build upon that understanding. We'll want to make sure that that is solid. So that's kind of an expectation of where to start is that we'll start with the zero knowledge.

[00:05:40] By the end of this first half of today, having gone through the up and going, it's essentially equivalent to the knowledge of say one, two, maybe three months of experience with JavaScript. Okay, you're not an expert programmer. You're not expected to be an expert programmer. You're not even expected to know how to write a complete application from scratch.

[00:05:59] But you should at least feel comfortable with that and that will be our goal today. So, interrupt me and ask lots of questions because there won't be hardly any lecture. There will be an awful lot of, I will read through a portion of the book, or talk about a portion of the book, illustrate some of that stuff, take some of the code samples and expound upon them in my code editor and then let you practice those things.

[00:06:19] And there will be a lot of back and forth with that so, If I skip over something, or if I say something a little bit too quick, or you'd like to go back, make this a very interactive thing, because I don't want it to just be a boring lecture.

[00:06:30] Okay, so that's kinda some ground rules for what to expect with the course, by the end you should have two, three months experience equivalent. And then the second half of what we'll go through later today will be more applied, so there won't be as much theory discussion, but more application discussion.

[00:06:46] And we'll walk through a little simple site application and apply some of our knowledge to that.