Conquering Code Academy
Up until this week, I had no idea what coding was. I had heard that it had something to do with computer languages, but i did not even know what those were. In my political science class, “coding” refers to color-coding and annotating legal texts, so i assumed computer coding was some form of labeling documents with “computer language.” Needless to say, I was clueless. Despite my lack of knowledge, when Dr. Wharton mentioned codeacademy.com, I froze. I was terrified. I immediately thought to myself, ‘Well, there goes my chances of an A. I can barely use Microsoft Office.’ At work on Wednesday, I looked up the subjects of the first Code Academy lesson: HTML & CSS. Acc0rding to Wikipedia (not the most credible, I know), HTML is a markup language and CSS is a “style sheet.” From what i had read, HTML & CSS did not look as daunting as Python or Java, so I got home and decided to give Code Academy a try.
Code Academy is very different from Lynda.com, which I have been an avid user of for the past year. Instead of instructional videos paired with quizzes, Code Academy utilizes a hands-on approach that let you physically practice typing out HTML and coding languages while you learn them. The “Introduction to HTML” section was surprisingly easy to understand. Line by line, it taught the rules of HTML syntax, and I could not move on in the lesson until I had correctly typed the correct syntax in the practice box, which helped me grasp the information much better than if i had watched a video or just read about HTML.
First, I learned how to “tell” the computer which language is being used by using the following heading in the first line of text:
<!DOCTYPE html>
The next line starts the document, which looks like this so far:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
To close the document, I must include </html> to the end of the text:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
</html>
An HTML text is divided into two parts, the head and the body. The head typically includes the title of the webpage, so my HTML document with a title looked like this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>
My First Code Academy Lesson
</title>
</head>
</html>
Next, I learned how to add paragraphs to my titled page via HTML document. The <p> represents paragraphs, as shown below:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>
My First Code Academy Lesson
</title>
</head>
<body>
<p> Code Academy is a great tool for learning computer coding skills </p>
</body>
</html>
In closing, I learned how to add bolded headings via the HTML document, as shown below. Headings come in 6 sizes, with the number before the “h” in the heading tag representing the size. h1 is the largest, and h6 is the smallest.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>
My First Code Academy Lesson
</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1> Benefits of Code Academy </h1>
<p> Code Academy is a great tool for learning computer coding skills </p>
</body>
</html>
I was surprised at how quickly I was able to grasp the Introduction to HTML lesson. When the steps were broken down, I was able to clearly understand the different parts of a HTML document. In the next lesson, which I will start tomorrow, I will learn to add images to a webpage with CSS. I am actually looking forward to it, and I think having a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS will be very beneficial when working on my personal site.