Day 7: Debugging javascript, Dynamic content, Form submitting, jQuery UI, Parallax Scrolling, and other javascript libraries

I find it pretty funny how the titles of my posts are getting longer and longer. That's just cause we cover so many topics each day yet go quite in depth with each one. That's what happens when this is all you're really doing for 13+ hours a day.

This morning lecture was about debugging Javascript. Michael Choi really emphasized the usage of Developer Tools that's already in Google Chrome. It's awesome that you can see the all the files that are part of the page's rendering, not to mention how you can alter the DOM and set breakpoints to figure out where the bug is. Another thing that Coding Dojo really emphasizes to stop thinking like a human and to think like a computer. Humans have a tendency to find patterns and without seeing the details, which is very problematic in debugging. Afterwards, it was back to working on assignments.

The last assignment in the basic jQuery section was to create a page that has a form where the user can submit data. The data would be used to create a "card" that displayed the inputted name on the front. Upon clicking the page, the inputted description would show up on the card. The beauty of javascript is that it is event-driven. Other languages like Ruby, Python, and Java (which are procedural) stop running after the code has been read. Javascript on the other hand keeps running while waiting for events to occur, which make its an ideal language candidate for a system like node (which we'll be learning starting week 8).

Next segment was using jQuery UI. This is a really great method to add a bunch of segments and characteristics to your code by using some jQuery UI files. For example, they made it extremely easy to make an image draggable. Each of the pieces of the ninja puzzle above are draggable and can be put together like a puzzle. All was possible by simply copy-and-pasting some code. Really makes life easy for developers everywhere.

jQuery UI isn't the only javascript library. There are thousands of libraries out there. For one of our last assignments with jQuery, we were to pick and choose 3 libraries to implement in a project of your choice. I personally have an obsession with parallax scrolling. Even if you don't know what parallax scrolling means, you probably have ran into one and thought to yourself, "man this is really cool". Becoming great at parallax scrolling is one of my main objectives of this bootcamp and my final project will probably implement it. Definitely something that I have to revisit in the future weeks. As for now I have more jQuery to learn.