Top Tracks - 81summer

Another installation of top tracks.  This time the track is 81summer by Uyama Hiroto.  The track is the first on an album called A Son of the Sun and as far as music goes it's really laid back.  Genre wise, it might be labeled jazz or hip hop depending on what you're paying attention to.  To me, the clean sounds are really relaxing and I find the track really pleasing to listen to.  While there isn't a lot of actual action and as a track goes it is pretty repetitive, it feels neither long nor short.  From the bits of static noise in the background to the piano to the drums to the sampled voice, all the parts just fit.  The piece just evokes a really refreshing feeling that never really gets old.  If you ever get a chance to listen to the whole album, most of the music is similar, although it's my opinion that 81summer is the best track on the album and why it has it's spot as a top track.

--CsMiREK

Step Four: JavaScript/jQuery

After learning HTML and CSS comes JavaScript.  So what exactly is JavaScript?  JavaScript is a programming language, much more similar to Java or C++ or Python than HTML or CSS.  What this means is that you can do much more computationally interesting things with JavaScript.  While HTML and CSS are focused mainly on rendering webpages from text, JavaScript is more about how to add interactivity to a site.  This is not fully true as CSS3 introduces a bunch of cool features that allow some interactivity that used to belong fully in the realm of JavaScript

More specifically though, why learn JavaScript?  In my opinion, JavaScript is more necessary than either HTML or CSS when it comes to programming for the web.  It allows for so much of the web, from pages that have auto-refreshing or auto-loading content a la Facebook walls (AJAX) to adding very complex actions on click or hover events.  However, JavaScript is also much more complex than HTML or CSS and takes a lot of work to really understand.

I have also put a point here to talk about jQuery.  jQuery is a JavaScript library designed almost solely for common web related JavaScript tasks.  What this means is that it is an independently created set of functions using JavaScript meant to make web based JavaScript easier.  It is useful, for instance, in when you want to add click events programmatically to objects.  Or perhaps you want to add new elements to a page when a button is clicked, jQuery provides easier and well tested ways of doing such things.  However, it should be noted that anything you do with jQuery can be done with JavaScript too.  In my opinion, you should learn JavaScript before jQuery so you know what kinds of benefits you are getting and so you know exactly what things are possible in regular JavaScript that are not expressible with jQuery functions.

That's all I've got on JavaScript and jQuery.  If you intend to do anything web related I view JavaScript as extremely necessary unless you want to make really static pages.  Anyways I hope you enjoyed that and hopefully I can back fill some of these old posts more quickly than I have.

--CsMiREK

Top Tracks - Love, Trust, Believe

This entry in the Top Tracks vein is about the song by Daishi Dance: Love, Trust, Believe.  The singer of the song is Lori Fine, who if you wanna find out more also belongs to the duet known as Coldfeet.  So, why did I pick this song?  Personally, I relatively rarely care about lyrics.  However, the lyrics to this particular song are really good and the voice matches them perfectly.  It's a very empowering song that's pretty catchy but isn't even completely about the lyrics or the singing.  It has a really prominent and interesting piano line and good vocal blending.  Sorry if these posts are kind of short.  After all, I'm only talking about one song and without going super into the details, I just want to appreciate the music that comes out of the world.  Until next time, keep listening and keep reading.

--CsMiREK

Musical Discovery: Parov Stelar

Wow, so if you actually follow this site at all, you'd know that this is being posted like...3 weeks late.  I've been busy moving halfway across the country.  I'm sure I'll catch up eventually.

If you don't follow this site...well move along and keep reading.

Anyways, this entry is on the electronic/swing artist Parov Stelar.  I was originally introduced to the music of Parov Stelar by one of my college roommates.  Specifically these songs.  Soon afterward, as I get with music I enjoy, I became semi-obsessed.  We had some really fun times rocking out to these beats.

In any case, back to the music.  Overall, it's a pretty jazzy set of music.  While it incorporates a lot of electronic aspects, the swing and jazz feel are really strong and really refreshing.  Especially so when you listen to pop music too much.  Don't get me wrong I love me some pop music, my first Musical Discovery was on Ellie Goulding after all.  But I find that if I listen to too much pop music, it just all blurs into a mess of...indistinct musical tropes.  On the other hand, I find that all of Parov Stelar's tracks are while genre-wise similar, their feel and overall execution vary greatly, in a good way.  From his use of trumpets with Harmon mute to his saxophone heavy melodies to his awesome collaborative singers, he just seems to make every piece magical in a different way.

Overall, I just think you're missing out if you haven't taken a listen.  He's got a bunch of stuff and in my opinion, all of it's good, which is pretty hard to find.

--CsMiREK

Step Three: CSS

Ok, if you've gotten this far, you know the basics of HTML.  But now you're probably wondering how websites manage to ever look nice with the clunkiness of raw HTML.  Blah blah you can use style tags and whatnot to position.  But let's be honest, that sucks.

And that's where CSS comes in.  CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which is a pretty strange name.  However, it's what makes web coding interesting.  By doing relatively simple things and organizing different fields: id, class, etc. you can make really organized and pretty good looking websites.  Don't worry about interactivity yet, that's coming up.  (Note that if you're into the hip, new CSS3 stuff, a lot of interactivity can be done with CSS.) If all you need is a really good looking site that won't flip a shit when you change one line in your HTML, after this section you'll be pretty much set.  (Interactivity is what makes the internet fun though so I hope you stick around.)

--CsMiREK

HTML Resource Four: Treehouse

Time for the fourth in this series on HTML resources, Treehouse.  From a first look standpoint, I find that the site is mainly based off of videos.  Now, while I personally don't want to sit through videos, I think that many people do like videos and so I will continue to review it based on content.  While the site is a paid site, there are a lot of introductory materials for free that you can try out.

Personally, I'm actually not going to sit through this site but the projects do seem quite good and the videos seem like really good resources.  However, I will say that it appears that the site does end up going quite in depth if you're willing to pay and they have stuff all the way from web development to iOS and Android development.  So if you're looking to dip your toes into programming and are willing to spend that bit of money for pretty much lectures with instructional aid, this site looks like a really fine website to help you in your pursuit.  Going forward, I'm going to cover the basics of what CSS is and what its functions are.  After that I'll go over codeavengers and Codecademy for those.  Then we'll dip into Javascript/JQuery and again I'll cover some resources to tell you what I think.  Until next time I hope you enjoyed the posts.

--CsMiREK

HTML Resource Three: Codecademy

The next resource I'm covering is Codecademy.  Codecademy is a pretty well known site as of now for being really intuitive and covering things in a pretty good and methodical manner.  Personally I find it to be a good, if a bit fast pace, more than CodeAvengers.  They also cover things for full stack development like Ruby, Python, and PHP if you think you might have a knack for the back end server kind of stuff.

When you get to the website, if you want to learn HTML, head up to the 'Learn' tab up top and go to 'Web Fundamentals'.  From there sections 1 through 3 are all HTML.  I didn't go quite as in depth on this one and didn't quite finish doing the tutorials, but from what I did, I really enjoyed it.  The pacing is pretty good and the examples are quite nice.  They don't have review sections quite like CodeAvengers does.  However, they do have full project type reviews after the main lessons which is just as, if not more, important to learning how to program.

Overall, I think that the breakdown and ordering of topics that Codecademy uses is better than CodeAvengers.  However, don't let that be a view that you pick up just because I said so.  Feel free to try everything and see what works.  Often times, I find myself picking things up long after I first learn them.  Just make sure you put in the effort and time and I think you can learn anything you put your mind to.  Until next time.

--CsMiREK

HTML Resource Two: CodeAvengers

Here we are at a tutorial based resource, CodeAvengers.  For this section I'll only cover the HTML portion of the tutorials (Up through lesson 10 of level 1) they have.  For reference, the entire section took me about an hour and a half to finish, although I was trying to rush most of it down, so expect maybe double to triple the amount of time if you're just starting out.  Anything else besides HTML covered, I'll cover in a different post. So let's get started.

To start with, I think that this particular tutorial series is kind of dumbed down.  It seems quite slow in its pacing, but for a beginner that might be exactly what you need.  However, I also find that their chosen interface is kind of clumsy.  The phone on the side is interesting, but the button placements and ordering to remember just seems extraneous.

I think the first lesson is kind of a throw away as you're mainly just typing text and it seems kind of pointless.  I also wish that they could just show both the example and your page at the same time.  Switching back and forth not only wastes time, it detracts from the learning experience and is kind of frustrating, especially when they have hints that sometimes outright give away the answers.  I also find that the ordering of topics is somewhat odd as the <p> or paragraph tag is not introduced until the 8th lesson.  They also make an example where they have <p> tags without the closing </p> tag, which while unnecessary, is cleaner and more straightforward in my opinion, <br> tags are the only exception really as <br></br> isn't correct syntax. They make their reasoning for this, but I just simply don't agree.  Regardless of these differences in opinion, I find the review lessons really useful as they make you find common mistakes which are sometimes quite frustrating for new coders. 

Overall, I think that the site is pretty good.  While slow paced for me, I already have some knowledge in the subject and for beginners I feel that it is probably moving at the right tempo.  Definitely check it out if you think you'd enjoy it.  Unfortunately it seems like you can't skip forward, so if you have some experience you'll have to go through the motions again.  However, the strictness of the system is pretty on point as well so I think it's definitely worth looking at if you're new to this subject and are looking for a fresh start.

--CsMiREK

HTML Resource One: w3schools

First up on the resource list is w3schools.  w3schools is a pretty simple website.  I actually started learning from w3schools just as a beginning.  It isn't the most fun nor the most interactive, however it does go through things very thoroughly.  If you really want to know why things are the way they are, w3schools helps out a bunch with that, or better yet look at Mozilla's mdn stuff as that's what a lot of professionals like to look at.

This review's pretty straightforward as the site is pretty straightforward.  The content is really quite good, but it goes more like a textbook than an interactive guide.  If you like that, then this is probably the site for you.  It also includes a lot of knowledge on things like CSS and JavaScript and covers those in very much a similar way.  As such I'll step back from reviewing w3schools again on those topics as it'll be pretty much the same thing.  If however, you find w3schools silly and suck, you're not alone.  In the end however, whatever helps you learn best is the best for you and I hope you don't take my words super seriously because as they say, "different strokes for different folks."

--CsMiREK

Step Two: HTML

In learning how to program for the web, the first essential element is HTML.  So the question to ask is, what exactly is HTML and why should I care?  HTML stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language and without going into too much detail, it's the reason why websites even exist.  Your internet browser (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc.) reads HTML and turns it into a readable format along with CSS.

As an analogy, we can say that HTML is the outline for your site.  It includes things like title, body, and headers along with paragraphs that are used to help describe and organize websites.  And just like an outline, a poorly written HTML file can lead to some pretty terrible looking things.  I won't go into details on how to build lists or tables in HTML, that's for the resources I'll cover.  However, I would like to say that HTML by itself is quite powerful, even without CSS or JavaScript.  But, I will also say that simply knowing HTML isn't enough to make really nice looking and robust websites.  Also, while you can do fine tuning of positioning and visual manipulation in HTML, that type of stuff is better suited for CSS, which I'll go over later.

Look forward to the next few updates which will cover some resources to get you started on HTML.

--CsMiREK

Step One: Resources

Step one in learning anything new is getting resources.  While some people like their books and swear by what books can teach them, I find that learning by book is really poor.  Don't get me wrong, books have their strengths, namely in organizing and structuring facts and knowledge.  However, they do a poor job of interacting and providing impetus to continue learning.  As such, I feel that any resource that does not give a strong level of interaction and satisfaction probably won't be good.

As for coding resources, I'm sure all of you can Google for 'coding tutorials' or 'html tutorials' or whatever the else you feel like typing.  But, I'll save you some trouble and give my own ideas about what these things do well and what they don't.  You'll notice that this month will have a lot of updates and that not all of them will be coding related.  I'll try to cover as much as possible and review as much as possible, but I'll put in some other stuff to break it up I promise.

If you want to get a heads up on what some other people think about the resources available and what it takes to be a coder, check out these links.  Ok, so the last one kinda sucks as it seems totally corporate, but I hope this month will be informative for you and I know I'll learn a lot.  I just hope you come along for the ride.  Also, fun fact, this is post number 42, woo!

--CsMiREK

Disclaimer

Unlike previous posts, this month's posts are gonna be a bit more technical.  As such, I want to make some things clear.  First, learning to program is not easy.  Like anything worth doing, it takes time and it takes work.  However, like most things, it can be readily learned.  And like many things on the internet, it has many resources available to you to help you.  These posts will be focusing on those resources and what I think of each one.  I am not an expert in HTML/CSS/JS coding so this will be an informative experience for me as well.  If you have any interest in the subject my recommendation is to learn a bit from tutorials.  But mainly I think the best way to learn is to jump into things, even if you fail, you're bound to learn from your failure.  When you can understand and appreciate this and my words, then I think you'll have gotten over some of the biggest hurdles facing you.  Without further ado, let's begin and I hope you come along for the ride.

--CsMiREK

Into the Void

Well, I hope you enjoyed poetry month.  I missed a couple of updates but they're all up now.  Other than that, I think I'll spend this month going over some HTML/CSS/JS resources.  Partially because I want to do it to help myself and partially because I think it'll be fun for you guys as well.  So without further ado, let's begin our journey into the void of the internet.

--CsMiREK