Writing Computer Code

Introduction 1

About This Book 1

About You 2

About The Icons 3

The First Step 4

Project 1: Becoming a Programmer 5

What Is Programming? 5

How can you talk to computers? 10

What languages will you learn? 14

Gathering Your Tools 18

Getting your browser ready 18

Working with JSFiddle 19

Sharing Your Fiddle 27

Summary 28

Project 2: Gathering the Parts to Build Your Robot 2 9

Saying What You Mean 30

Making a statement 31

Following the rules 33

Giving and Receiving Data 34

Knowing Your Operands and@Operators 39

Introducing the Super-Calculator 40

Forking the Super-Calculator 41

Using the Super-Calculator 42

Super-calculating with text 44

Summary 47

Project 3: Building Your Robot’s Body 48

Writing HTML 48

Seeing what text looks like without HTML 49

Using HTML: It's all about the tags 50

Nesting HTML tags 52

Writing your first HTML document 54

Knowing your HTML elements 56

Introducing Douglas the Robot 58

Changing HTML Using JavaScript 4

Summary 66

Project 4: Giving Your Robot Style 67

Giving Douglas Style 68

Getting the Basics of CSS 69

CSS selectors 70

CSS declarations 74

CSS properties 76

Colorizing Douglas 78

Using CSS colors 78

Changing colors 81

Customizing Your Own Robot 84

Summary 85

Project 5: Animating Your Robot 87

Changing CSS with JavaScript 87

Modifying Douglas with JavaScript 89

Experimenting with Douglas 92

Making Douglas Dance 94

Creating Animations with JavaScript 97

Animating another element 100

Using a second animation function 100

Summary 104

Project 6: Creating a JavaScript Word Game 105

Creating a Variable Story 105

Creating the Word Replacement Game 106

Writing the HTML 108

Styling the Word Game 111

Writing the JavaScript Code 114

Finishing the Program 117