Calculus, physics, and French, oh my!

I have been slogging a bit in the Ruby prework, and I’ve figured out part of the reason I continue to feel unsure about what I’m learning.

When I was taking calculus 1, I did the best on the sections where I went to office hours and watched the professor solve problem after problem. When I was taking physics, I went to office hours and watched the professor demonstrate the process he went through to solve problems. I also practiced the problem-solving techniques over and over to really understand how to approach different kinds of problems. I’ve never been closer to reading French fluently than when I took F306 <<Roman et poésie>> (Novels and poetry) and was reading, speaking, and writing French for hours every week.

With Ruby, I haven’t watched enough experts solve problems, I don’t (yet) have a teacher who can explain their problem-solving process, and I just plain haven’t been exposed to enough code, Ruby or otherwise, to seamlessly follow along with what I’m reading when looking at code. While currently frustrating, I am feeling more confident that I know how to fix the problem. More Ruby practice, here I go!

 

Taking a big leap!

I am so thrilled that I’ve been accepted into the Fall 2013 class at MakerSquare! I have dabbled in little bits of this (HTML and CSS from 2005) and little bits of that (a really cool but entirely too short Software Carpentry workshop). This is something I’ve had the itch to really dive into for a long time, but never had the time (a cliche, I know).

I’m also a bit nervous, as I was a bit late to the game, and have a lot of prework to do before class starts. Fortunately, the basics of HTML haven’t changed THAT much since I last tried my hand at HTML. 

My favorite thing I’ve learned so far is how much cooler CSS is than I thought it was. Granted, when I was first introduced to CSS I thought it was pretty cool, but CSS3 can do so much more than I remember! I love that you can make whole awesome elements out of HTML and CSS code without needing images! 

I also am glad to finally understand a situation I ran into a few months ago. Firefox had eaten the favicons for a few of my bookmarklets (again), and I was trying to find the favicons so I could manually add them too the bookmarklets, and I kept running into the problem where the icon I wanted was on one large image with many other icons! But thanks to CodeSchool’s CSS Cross-Country class, I understand! It’s a clever way of having all your icons load when the page loads so you can do fancy things like mouseovers with CSS!