About two weeks ago I wrote an article about Codecademy and How to Learn Programming the Quick and Easy Way where I mentioned the experiences I made with the Python section. I never really learned JavaScript, although I made some small attempts in my childhood during the time when internet was still in it’s infancy.

This was the time when we crawled around the web with our not so speedy 56K modems, and when coding self-hosted ugly personal websites in HTML was the latest fad. However, because internet was expensive, slow, and relatively “small”, educational resources were somewhat limited, and I think my JavaScript book was just not “good” enough for me at the given time, so I never really picked it up – this “little” programming language.

JavaScript, HTML & CSS, and jQuery

Roughly a decade and a half later, I rekindled my former childhood passion and started the JavaScript, HTML & CSS, and jQuery sections on Codecademy. All of them begin really easy, especially the JavaScript course, which was basically intended for people, who have never coded before. If you are somewhat familiar with some other programming language, you can rush through the first few chapters very quickly. I think the plan was to take them one after each other, but I think taking those courses parallel, also works just fine, since those three things are also somewhat interconnected to each other: JavaScript to write your “application” or script, HTML put it online on a webpage, CSS to make it look nice, and eventually jQuery to make the whole package look a lot more sophisticated with the least amount of effort.

Now, what about the “10 Minutes A Day To Become A Web Developer”?

Excuse me, but I thought this might be a very catchy title for this article, but there is also a lot of truth in the rumor – and you can make it happen! I just devoted some time in the evening to study a little bit on Codecademy, and in the end I wrote two little web applications that were/are very useful for my daily work. Instead of writing the code in Python, I used JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and jQuery, and uploaded it onto a web server so also colleagues and other people can make use of it, without the need of downloading scripts and facing version issues.

If you are curious of what you can accomplish by devoting a few minutes over a period of some weeks, here are my little web apps:

Okay, the design is not very fancy, but hey, it works great and does its job!

Now, imagine what can be done of you keep it rolling for months or years!?

The Other Perspective: Python and Google’s Apps Engine

If you want an approach from a different angle, I can only recommend you to take Steve Huffman’s (creator of Reddit and Hipmunk) Web Development lecture on Udacity for free (https://www.udacity.com/course/cs253).
CS253: Web Development is beyond just setting up a simple HTML webpage and shows you how to use Python to write web applications, which will eventually run on Google’s Apps engine. At the end of this lecture Steve Huffman’s promise is to have build a full functional web blog – a real self-made web blog, not just an account on WordPress.
And please don’t give up if the first introductory unit on HTML seems to be boring and too easy. I can assure you that it’s getting really interesting and challenging in unit 2!

I hope I also kindled your interest in coding! I like to read your comments, and maybe I see some new web pages soon