tutorial – Code Notes

5-minute JavaScript tutorials

So many tutorial videos are so darned long! This summer, I set out to make a new series of videos for absolute beginners in JavaScript. They are free on YouTube, and here is the playlist:

JavaScript Beginners

Most of these video are shorter than 5 minutes. Only one is longer than 6 minutes (6:43), and I might try to go back and make that one shorter.

I have tried to title each video very specifically so that you can scan the playlist and pick a focused topic without thinking too hard.

The idea was to demonstrate characteristics of JavaScript, as well as the most basic programming concepts, in the JavaScript console — which every modern web browser has. I hope this will encourage beginners to play along and try things out in the console themselves.

A new Flask tutorial for journalism students

This semester I’ve been gradually building out a single, comprehensive python-beginners repo at GitHub, and the latest segment is all about getting started with Flask — a popular Python framework for building web apps (and easier than Django).

I have tried to use various books and online tutorials to teach Flask for the past two years, but I’ve finally given up on that because there’s just so much extra stuff (confusing for my students), or they are outdated and largely wrong now, or both.

Miguel Grinberg’s new, fully updated mega-tutorial for Flask is comprehensive and thorough — but it’s just too thorough, really, for journalism and communications students who only learned Python about four weeks ago.

Leaflet for interactive maps

The latest update I’ve made to a handout for students is Introduction to Leaflet.js. Leaflet is a JavaScript library for creating very flexible interactive maps, using a variety of tile sets — which enables you to make a map that looks quite different from a Google Map. There are lots of options for customization.

The Leaflet Quick Start Guide is good, but it doesn’t walk a beginner through how to enable the use of Mapbox tile sets, even though Leaflet recommends using them. Mapbox changed drastically about a year back, and those changes made it necessary to rewrite my tutorial.

Separately, I have a Leaflet assignment for students in their seventh week of working with JavaScript.