 |
| The best header images are the ones where you can't see anything useful... right? My apologies for getting in the way. Teehee. Screenshot is from the third tutorial project at https://dash.generalassemb.ly |
HTML. Even the acronym sounds intimidating. Too bad most of the internet runs on it, so it's probably a good idea to realize that it's not actually that hard. If someone bothers to explain it properly. It also happens to be really awesome.
Yesterday, I started doing a set of tutorials for HTML, CSS and Javascript made by a website called Dash, as was suggested to me by someone because of my interests in web design. The good news was, I already had a somewhat rudimentary understanding of HTML thanks to tinkering with the blog you're reading right now. The bad news was that tinkering and doing aren't the same thing, and a day later and 2 cups of coffee later, (that's a lot considering I don't drink coffee ever really), I had experienced several interesting things in the process of doing these tutorials at https://dash.generalassemb.ly.
Firstly, when someone. (or something in this case), actually explains something to you properly, it is VERY easy to learn new skills. Although I had learnt a fair chunk of HTML skills through trial and error, I've gotta say, these tutorials would have saved me days of arduous effort if I'd found them first. (*facedesk*) The GeneralAssembly tutorials go to great lengths to explain not only how to do certain things, but why you need to do them, why they work the way they do and why they were designed to work that way. Quite frankly, if you don't come out of these tutorials feeling like an HTML expert, then you should get some sleep and try again tomorrow, since it's hard to learn when you're that exhausted.
As I soon learnt though, HTML is actually an immensely intuitive language once you understand how it works. HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is effectively a list of tag's that tell your computer what it needs to display. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, are what tells you computer how to display those HTML tags by assigning attributes to the tags. (That's the layman's version at any rate.) Once you understand that, the hardest part of HTML is learning what you actually want to do to get the desired effect. Thankfully again, the earlier linked tutorials slowly introduces you to effectively everything you would need to know in order to do everything from making fancy blogs to designing robots purely from HTML. (Not as difficult as you would expect.)
 |
| Robots are fun. They're also fun to give flashing red eyes. Dash teaches you how to do that too if you're interested. |
What gets interesting later about the Dash tutorials is that it eventually starts introducing you to Javascript in order to do everything from creating interactive page elements to showing alerts about various things, as well as all manner of other interesting things. The first thing I realized when doing these Javascript tutorials is that programming is far more fun than I expected. The second thing that I realized is that programming is far more irritating than I expected, and I suddenly understood why all my programmer friends always sounded so suicidal. (Sadly not a joke. If you are feeling suicidal by the way, please contact a suicide hotline. Suicide is not the answer my friend, no matter how appealing it might sound.)
Macabre subjects aside, part of this whole endeavor was to have some interesting new experience to blog about, so I hope you appreciate the amount of work I put into this one considering I've effectively been researching this subject since yesterday afternoon. (Though it was somewhat to my benefit, so don't sweat it too much.) The subject got fairly interesting when my javascript fun took me to Twitter where I began speaking to good, and rather experienced, friend, @yestinj who has been using Javascript for over 7 years now. Apart from humorously pointing out that my first mistake was actually deciding to learn Javascript, he went on to say how it is actually his favorite language, and that having an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is invaluable for someone attempting to write code, most likely in the hopes of preserving both time and sanity.
While likely sage advice, I fear I was unable to actually test them out for myself due to the unfortunate fact that of the 3 suggested programs, the highly acclaimed NetBeans became the most unstable program I've ever even tried installing in years. a cumulative 10 crash report dumps from 3 reinstalls, and another 50 in total from plain attempts to get the program to run. (Irony is a program lauded for it's open source compatibility and ease of use, being a bitch to even install... let alone run.)
I'm sure I'll get it functioning eventually if I can figure out what's causing it to behave in such an ornery fashion. The other suggested programs were IntelliJ from http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ and Eclipse from https://www.eclipse.org/, though both are actually more focused on pure Java code, rather than Javascript for the internet. (A blog topic for the future I think.)
In any case, I look forward to tinkering further with Javascript and HTML in general, and perhaps even some more advanced programming languages down the line. But first, I need to go sleep off 10 straight hours of coding and 2 cups of caffeine that I never intended on drinking. If you have some specific questions about HTML, or simply have some interesting tutorial or programming language to suggest I check out, perhaps for future blog post, then do be sure to say so down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter. We here at TCSA love to hear your feedback. Of course, if you have you have any web design enthusiast friends, consider sharing this article with them. I'm sure they, like us here at TCSA, will appreciate it immensely. Better yet, if you yourself would like to read more interesting articles such as this, then please do be sure to like the official TCSA Facebook page and/or follow us via Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar the left so that you can get all the latest posts, as they're published. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.
Happy coding my friends.
