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Transcript from the "Exercises Overview" Lesson
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>> [MUSIC]
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>> Kyle Simpson: So the folder is called jsorg and let's open. Let's start by opening up the Read Me just to orient ourselves.
>> Kyle Simpson: In this exercise, you're going to modify an existing code to wire up basic interactivity for a simple site. The objective of this challenge is to exercise your skills with basic JavaScript, including events and DOM interactions, as well as some best practices for organizing code.
[00:00:32] In fact, it's that latter one that we more care about. We more care about seeing in practice how we organize JavaScript code than necessarily exactly how we deal with events interactions although there will be some practice with that. So we're gonna use jQuery as our little library that helps us do events and interactions more easily.
[00:00:53] If you don't have any experience with jQuery at all, that's totally cool cuz I'm gonna show you the little bits and pieces that you need to know about it. But this is not a course on jQuery so I'm not gonna get much into the details of it, I'll just show you what to do.
[00:01:06] But there's one thing here this **Note** that I want to point out to you. And I wish there was a way for me to make this detail not something that you have to worry about. If there was any way, I as a teacher, could just make this detail go away, I would.
[00:01:19] Unfortunately, we have a complicating detail here for you to run this exercise because we're gonna be doing AJAX requests inside of the exercise. If you're using Chrome or IE, you're gonna need something more than just running with these files themselves. If you choose Firefox, Firefox at the moment doesn't have a security restriction on it and we're able to do AJAX just from one file to another.
[00:01:44] So it's an easier story if you're using Firefox. If you're using something like Chrome or like IE, like I am, you're gonna actually need to run a little local web server instance in the folder. So that you can load it up through local host in your browser rather than through the file system.
[00:02:01] So if you're on a Mac, this is actually really easy. If you're in the directory, as I am here. All you need to do if you're on a recent Mac is type in python minus -m and then SimpleHTTPServer. And then, the last parameter is a port number which I always like 8005 for whatever reason.
[00:02:25] What this is gonna do is spin up a simple static file server in that directory so that we can access the contents of the directory as if it was coming from a web server. If you're not running on a Mac, you can still get Python for free. You can download from python.org, a Python interpreter, and it will run very similar to this.
[00:02:46] It's a slightly different syntax but it runs very similar to that and you can do the same thing. Or you could use Apache or IIS or any one of about a dozen other local web servers to run it. The easiest is if you're on a Mac and it's just built in or if you wanna go get Python from python.org and download it because it's just a simple one liner.
[00:03:08] But there are other options if you decide you wanna go that route.