I am not sure where this journey will take me and what adventures I might have along the way. But that is at least half the fun of a journey isn't it? The end is never really the end and I have learned that we are always learning - but the destination I have in mind (for now) is to become a competent coder, and to be able to find my way around a Linux command line. I intend to document the trip and share what I learn along the way.
I am the product of 53 years of life experience and a public education received when banging rocks together and grunting was our highest form of communication. As may be painfully obvious, I have no real experience with coding. I have wide and various interests including photography, travel, language (I speak some Chinese) and writing and now coding. I have been involved with computers since DOS. See... I wasn't kidding about that banging rocks stuff.
Here is an image of the code used thus far (a few edits ago) to produce this page:
Don't worry! It looks much harder than it actually is!
One caveat: I am an amateur and may unintentionally fail to give the tools I will be reviewing their full due. As I become experienced with them though, I will hopefully grow along with them, and reveal more of their true potential. The point anyway is to give the perspective of a beginner and show progress as I move along.
I really do love Coda for iOS and think it is an amazing text editor. It has syntax highlighting - and the colors given to coding really do help me see what is going on. It also has really good code completion. As I type one of it offers completions of the code, and is really smart about how it does it. Everything is customizable and really well thought out. And being able to do the coding on my iPad while I am sitting at Starbucks? Awesome! I was skeptical at first but this program really works. I have its big brother for comparison and it is also really great but what amazes me is the ability to get a powerful, convenient program on the iOS platform.
My only quibble with Coda for iOS is that its file navigation is a little un-intuitive (at least for me). It is a little confusing but I am sure I will get the hang of it. My one other thought about using a text editor that auto completes like Coda is that maybe I should actually type out some of the code so I get practice at it. The whole learning by repetition thing. I could always turn off the auto-complete feature if I wanted to but it I don't really see typing it all out as a big help for me and have done some of that on the html tutorials at Neocites. Which brings me to...
Neocities: This place puts the fun in being on the web and learning to code. Their html tutorials work great and get you up and running in short order. The dashboard system they use to actually upload your code and create your webpage is simple and easy to use. I think it is wonderful that something like this exists and it is free! You should really try it:-).
Okay, so that's the update for February 14 2018! Have a great Valentine's Day everyone. It is a very special day for me! And someone I know:-)