July 4th update.

Happy 4th of July. On this holiday weekend its time to write down where I'm at in my quest to become a Front End Developer. There is some great news here:

1. I have successfully completed the entire Front End Development course track on teamtreehouse.com.
2. At this point I am beginning to grasp Javascript and being able to write my own programs.
3. I have a solid outline of actions that I will take in the coming months to achieve full competence with Javascript.

After a lot of research online I have realised how lucky I am to be learning javascript at this time, in mid-2015. The greatest thing about it is all of those who have gone before me and mapped out a path. In 1995 I had just gotten my first computer and javascript was a brand new language, it would be over a decade before javascript even popped up on my radar, and another nine years after that before I attempted to learn the language for myself. During all that time, there were those who started right in on javascript and to them I give thanks, and I want to express my admiration for those who stumbled around in the dark to uncover the power of this language, never giving up. I admire that pioneering spirit.

Here are my thoughts about Treehouse. That is a great program, I signed on at the $25 dollar a month level barely knowing the difference between html and CSS. It took me just over four months to complete the Front End Development track, by the time I was finished I could generate a new web page at will with HTML, style it with CSS, and make it do things with Javascript, Along the way I was also introduced to Jquery, Ajax, and Git.

Right now I have two projects that I am working on, a coffee machine repair site called coffee tech, and my personal site called joncoppock. Currently I have suspended my enrollment at Treehouse and I am about 40% through the javascript course over at codecademy.com.

To support the course material on codecademy, I have ordered 4 books from ebay:

• JAVASCRIPT BY EXAMPLE - ELLIE QUIGLEY . I sat with this book for about 15 minutes in Barnes and Nobel and I saw all the axamples and realised right away that it fits well with my learning style. The thing is, I hate to pay full price when I can get it cheaper somewhere else. I found it on ebay for $15.00 less than in the store.
• JAVASCRIPT FOR KIDS - NICK MORGAN. Another book I discovered at Barnes and Nobel, my thinking here is that if it is simple enough for a child to understand, then it may help to get me through some of the more complicated parts like looping through data with for  and while loops.
• Beginning JavaScript - Mcpeak, Jeremy/ Wilton, Paul. This book was recomended as support material to the codecademy javascript course by this article: http://javascriptissexy.com/how-to-learn-javascript-properly/. Personally I have always found that it is better to examine a problem from many perspectives than it is to use a single point of view. Maybe you are getting the point here, being functional in javascript is very important to me. 
• Professional Javascript for Web Developers - Zakas, Nicholas . Another Barnes and Nobel find, and also discovered in this article: https://sivers.org/learn-js. I hope you are looking at these links, because there is a ton of great and inspiring information here. 

So there it is, my study material for the near future, until such a time as I feel confident in javascript and I am ready to move on, where I will learn the angular.js framework.

Cheers,

Jon