Programming By Stealth

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us about inheritance (relationships between classes) and polymorphism. Now he said polymorphism is a concept that throws most first-level college students, but in an odd twist, I didn't find it confusing at all! Plus, he lets us play with cows, ducks and turkeys in his example so it's loads of fun.

We also have a great new study tool created by Dorothy, aka MacLurker. She created an index of terms so you can jump right to the blog post where Bart talked about the term. I've been using it and it's grand! You might want to bookmark podfeet.com/blog/pbs-index.

As always, Bart's most excellent written tutorial is available at bartbusschots.ie/....

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart adds one more thing to the list of changes to arrays, and that's the spread operator. Then we'll learn how to get rid of the "const self = this" kludge for callbacks using the arrow functions. After that, we learn the basics of classes, a concept introduced in ES6 which brings JavaScript into the world of other C-style languages.

Bart's excellent written tutorial for this installment is available here: bartbusschots.ie/...

Bart at the end asks a question - would you be interested in learning how to build command line apps using JavaScript? So far we've only be working on web apps, but command line apps will allow us to manipulate things in the file system, the network and even to the Internet itself without using a web browser. Let us know via email to me at [email protected], or write up your thoughts in our Facebook group at podfeet.com/facebook or our Google Plus group at podfeet.com/googeplus or you can even tweet us at @podfeet and @bbusschots.

In this week's Programming By Stealth, Bart starts by actually giving me credit for leading him to rethink his strategy on the use of const and let. He was nudged along in the strategy by the most awesome Jill.

Then Bart goes on to reveal even more of the joy that is JavaScript ES6. He explains ES6 Arrays, how to loop through Arrays, and in a change that brings a tear to my eye, the simpler way you can now loop over Strings and how concatenation is a thing of the past when building strings. This is truly a joyful show!

As always, Bart's detailed tutorial is available at bartbusschots.ie/...

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart spends most of the time talking through his solution to the previous challenge, where we added start and stop buttons to our Game of Life. In his solution he actually modifies the prototype to accommodate the ability to add these buttons. He explains his process and his decisions along the way. I'm not going to lie, this one confused me quite a bit in the middle but we both hope it's because we've been away from the hard-core JavaScript for quite a while.

Once we have that under our belts, he starts explaining some of the cool, new features in JavaScript ES6 where we abandon var and replace it with let and const. He explains the value of these new terms (and the problems they solve!)

Bart's full tutorial is available as always at bartbusschots.ie/...

CCATP #507 for October 29, 2017, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. It is also a Programming By Stealth, installment 42 of X with Bart Busschots. It's finally time to tie all the bits and pieces we've learned together and create our first web app. Armed with our HTML, CSS, jQuery and JavaScript knowledge, and our Cellular Automata Prototype, Bart walks us through how to bring the Game of Life...to Life! It's a lot of fun and I understood a great deal of it (I'm not gonna lie, it wasn't 100% this time.)

As always Bart's amazing tutorial for this episode is available at: bartbusschots.ie/

In a shocking turn of events, I actually followed all of Programming By Stealth this week! Bart walked us through his solution to last week's HTML5 Forms Validation homework, and in so doing highlighted some especially clever things he did. I was pretty pleased with my own version of the homework, and in fact Bart gave me a gold star for one thing I did. Bart also explains how he used CSS to make his form even more readable.

In the second half of the episode he shows how to use jQuery to improve the forms even more. He demonstrates how certain requirements cannot be met with the built-in forms validation and how we can use jQuery instead. I loved this episode because it tied in our knowledg of jQuery back to HTML forms.

Bart's most excellent written tutorial can be found at PBS 40 of x – HTML5 Custom Validations with jQuery on bartb.ie.