High level overview

This is a good introductory resource to get to grips with HTML, CSS and JS. I read this book because at the time I was job searching, whilst learning a new language to be more marketable, whilst doing coding challenges etc. such that I was worried my basic core skills were getting rusty. Also, it's quite nice to learn from different resources and I suppose I am old-fashioned in that I grew up with paper copy books being the go-to source of knowledge.

It was a quick read as a lot of the information was already known which means I have been making progress! I did add a few css property definitions to my notes file that I wasn’t aware of before reading the book. I have to admit that I still enjoy having a hard copy I can take with me- very handy to get a few pages done when I'm on the commute.

Learning Process

It’s a beginners guide so the learning process is typically reading the theory as explained by the author, then showing a coded example. As you progress through the back end of the book, you are expected to make some predictions in the output and attempt to code it up. Failing that, the coded method is provided. There are a few typos, which if you were a complete beginner and typing out the examples to the letter, this would be a frustrating experience. The publisher does state no responsibility for errors or omissions.

General Thoughts

The section at the end, ‘bringing it all together’ is the interesting part but I still struggled with what the aim was for the JS part. I think it was for a button to toggle whether the JS code should be displayed or hidden. I'm not sure why you would want this. I think this section should have been implementation of some basic event listeners like onclick() or onmouseover(): show something or do some preset css animation. Maybe I missed the point and it’s time to brush up on events and handling events again!

There was a chapter right at the end about domains and hosting, using ftp. It was a short summary and implied that the process of getting your webpages "online" was quite a straightforward one using the recommended GoDaddy.com site and Filezilla. Maybe it is with these software. I recall towards the end of the bootcamp in December 2021 when I was uploading files to One.com (recommended by the IT bootcamp provider), it was a painstaking process to check and update the file paths where referenced in the code for the different projects in my portfolio. I also found myself updating minor tweaks in the server file editor such that my local copy on my machine and indeed on GitHub repo were out of sync. Some students from the cohort were still going through the process of uploading their work to the host after the bootcamp so I guess I'm not the only one who faced technical problems. I assume from this experience, is to seek out alternative methods and see what's popular amongst developers.

Anyway, it was a good read for reinforcing what I had already learned, but next time I’ll spend 5-10 mins skim reading a new book and ask, how much new knowledge do I stand to gain from reading this book compared to the time invested?