During week 2 we worked on JavaScript. I was glad that I went through the JavaScript exercises at Codecademy before class started, because we quickly went through the basics and into the more complex aspects of the programming language. If I had not already had experience with those basics, I might have felt lost.

We continued to read each other’s code, which was useful in that we were able to see that, in general, there are different ways for the code to accomplish the same task. Sometimes we paired up to compare methods; other times someone would get up in front of the class to show the code they had written and invite comments. I was able to do this earlier in the week.

On Friday, some of our assigned tasks involved using one function to call another. A particularly complicated assignment required us to write a function where one of the arguments was another function (referred to as a callback). This initially posed a dilemma for me, since I could not see how this could work unless I was able to add functionally within the callback—and, as it turned out, that’s what needed to be done and was actually possible, though not easy.

Along with this we covered “best practices” of coding, as well as the reasons why one style of coding might result in fewer problems than another style. In addition, we continued to learn more programming tools and techniques.

Overall, this continues to be a satisfying learning experience. It is intensive, but the intensity seems to give the tasks focus. Looking forward to seeing what’s next!