By the end of this section you will be able to do the following:
- Intuitively understand the primary language constructs JavaScript provides to developers and how those constructs are used to write express logic and write code.
- Demonstrate that understanding by explaining these constructs to others.
- Write basic working javascript code.
- Read basic javascript code written by others.
- Build a basic Console Application in JavaScript (and know what that means!)
The primary purpose of this second part of Tier 1 is to officially introduce the JavaScript programming language. There are several components of the language that you could think of as “language agnostic” meaning the exist in similar form and function in most other programming languages as well - and we will be sure to cover and point these concepts out as we go through this section of the bootcamp curriculum.
- Variables
- Conditionals
- Functions
- Scope
- Arrays
- Loops
- Iterators
- Objects
We are going to start off with the brilliant codecademy intro to javascript interactive online (Free) course. You CAN pay for upgrade memberships to codecademy but it is not necessary - a free account is fine to complete this course.
The course suggests that it will take about 15 hours to complete, but I suspect this includes all of the assignments, projects, and additional things they include in their curriculum. Meaning, you could likely complete the course several hours sooner by skipping the projects and extra things it provides. You can also do all of those things if you would like, they will certainly help you gain a better understanding of the language!
That being said, I have a project planned for cohort students when they’ve finished the codecademy course that I will be able to provide real-time support, a lecture/live demo, and office hours to help with at that time. So don’t feel obligated to do the codecademy projects/extra assignments.
The main purpose of this is to get you to a level of functional understanding of the primary programming language constructs javascript provides. All of the concepts you will cover in codecademy course are generally universal across programming languages - meaning python, java, c++, etc… they all have an implementation of these same constructs - so consider this your computer science and programming fundamentals course: you do NOT want to skip these things, and ask as many questions as you need to in the community, to an AI, and me in order to understand at least vaguely what this part of tier 1 is teaching.
Once more: we will be using these concepts to put together our first project for The Heartbroken Dev Bootcamp immediately following your completion of the codecademy intro to javascript course, more on that to come.
I want to give everyone a chance to go through as much of the Codecademy course as they can before I give my take on it / a lecture covering the same material… I will schedule 2-4 lectures/live walkthroughs of this content for each cohort. If at all possible, attempt to progress through as much of the codecademy course as much as they can before joining the lecture.
Check out the announcements channel and events scheduled in your respective cohorts for the posted live sessions by me, and one more time, PLEASE: make an effort to go through as much of the codecademy course as you can before attending these sessions - you will get so much more out of my attempts at covering this material if you’ve already taken a stab at understanding it yourselves :)
We will wrap this tier-1 up with a captstone project at the end. The time between my publishing of this part-2 content and the submissions for the capstone project will be roughly 1 week - so go quick if you can but the asynchronous nature of this bootcamp should hopefully allow for folks to move at their own pace as needed too.
As always, the community and myself are at your disposal for questions, sharing, and getting un-stuck!
Coming Soon...