The first 50 people to sign up for the Web Design from the Ground Up course at Udemy using the special code webteacher.ws will receive access to the class absolutely free. This is a class for beginners. Here’s what you’ll learn:
Over 38 lectures and 9.5 hours of content
Introduction to HTML and XHTML including the most commonly used elements like linking
Introduction to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for working with fonts, colors, and complete layout control
Web Graphics and Image manipulation with an introduction to Photoshop
Introduction to JavaScript with practical applications including script tags, alert boxes, form validation, and much more
Domain name registration – how it works, pointing your domain to your site, best practices and much more
How to put your site on the Internet, including choosing a web host, working with FTP, and much more
Accessibility – make your site visible to all users
Ecommerce with PayPal – setting up a shopping cart, integrating PayPal, making money with your site!
That’s a lot for 10 hours, so I’m guessing it will be basic info, but that’s what a beginner needs, isn’t it?
Many thanks to Udemy for making this special offer available to Web Teacher readers.
JavaScript & jQuery: Interactive Front-End Web Development by Jon Duckett is from Wiley & Sons (2014). This book earns high praise from me as educationally sound. It reminds me a little of the Head First series of books, except this book isn’t silly. But it does use a number of interesting techniques to help you learn that are based in sound pedagogy.
Color Coding
There’s color coding for everything, which helps some people learn. Diagrams and infographics are on a dark background. Within the page itself, various elements are also color coded.
An example diagram page
Background pages and examples are on a light background.
An example page
Again, there is color coding within the page itself.
Reference pages are on a gray background with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript codes all shown in different colors. There are also separate color schemes for introductory pages and summary pages in each chapter.
Clear Language
The language is plain, very careful, easy to understand by anyone. Every single detail is explained in clear, simple sentences. It’s a masterpiece of clear writing. For example, here’s the initial description of jQuery:
jQuery is a JavaScript file that you include in your web pages. It lets you find elements using CSS-style selectors and then do something with the elements using jQuery methods.
Scope
Beyond the pedagogy that went into presenting the material in the book in a way that makes it easy to grasp, there is also the scope of the book. It covers more concepts than I’ve seen in a book of this type. It covers all the JavaScript basics, the Document Object Model, jQuery, Ajax & JSON, APIs, error handling and debugging, filtering, form enhancement and more. The book is over 600 pages long.
The examples are real world with downloadable code. The code shown in the book is annotated (and color coded) with every detail fully explained. The output for every code example is pictured next to it.
Programming books often make my eyes cross and close automatically, but this one kept my interest. I learned many new things about topics that I hadn’t really understood before. I’d recommend it for independent learning. The exercises and examples in the book would also work as a classroom text for a JavaScript class.
Summary: Detailed, careful, guide to JavaScript, jQuery and more.
A review by Virginia DeBolt of JavaScript & jQuery: Interactive Front-End Web Development (rating: 5 stars)
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for this review. Opinions are my own. Links to Amazon are affiliate links. Here is my review policy. You can buy the book from Wiley, as well as Amazon. The link to Wiley is not an affiliate link.
This is worth your time. It’s a talk by Monika Piotrowicz of Shopify. I like her instruction to use basic HTML whenever possible instead of putting something else in to overrule the semantics. Her explanation of ARIA is excellent.
The close captions aren’t great. They were generated automatically rather than from a transcript, but they do appear if you need them.
Hat tip to Dennis Lembree who shared this on Google+, which is where I first saw it.
I saw this tweeted by Kristina Halvorson, so I took a look. It’s a tool to help you generate ideas for new content for your blog, called Content Strategy Generator. It works through Google Drive.
Here’s a blog with JavaScripts, tutorials and articles that might help you. Creative JS.
The iPad Classroom is a Paper.li daily that might give you some good teaching ideas. Any Paper.li daily can be subscribed to, including the one I curate, Women in Web Education.
