Day 131: Ch 61 "A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript"

Today, I'm starting with Chapter 61 The DOM: Junk Artifacts and Nodetype.  There's 89 chapters in the book, so that means I'm a little over two thirds of the way done.  I've learned quite a bit, and it makes me really happy to see myself getting closer and closer to my goal of becoming a web developer.

I learned about junk artifacts, which are placeholder text nodes which the browser inserts at various points, such as carriage returns.  These artifacts make moving through the nodes more cumbersome, and various ways have been devised to get around this.  One way, when wanting to target a particular element, for example, the text node within a paragraph element node, is by giving the paragraph an id and then directing JavaScript to go straight to it, like so:

document.getElementById("p2").innerHTML = "All his men.";

The code replaces the text node within "p2" with the string, "All his men."  This code:

var nType = targetNode.nodeType;

Returns a number.  A 1 means the targeted node (you don't type "targeted node," you type in the variable that represents the targeted node) is an element node, while a 3 means the targeted node is a text node.

Okay, I finished chapter 61, now I'm working on Chapter 62 The DOM: More Ways to Target Elements.   

I finished Chapter 62, which introduced .lastChild, .firstChild, .parentNode, .nextSibling, and .previousSibling.  I'll start tomorrow off on Chapter 63 The DOM: Getting a Target's Name.

SUMMARY OF CODING SKILLS

Total Treehouse Points: 5,385
Treehouse Points by Subject Matter (Miscellaneous not included): 
HTML:                                663 
CSS:                                1,599 
Design:                            1,193 
Development Tools:            747 
Javascript:                      1,120

Treehouse Ranking (%): "You have more total points than 94% of all students."

Treehouse Badge(s) Earned Today:

Treehouse Courses Completed:
How to Make a Website
HTML
CSS Foundations
CSS Layout Techniques

Aesthetic Foundations
Design Foundations
Adobe Photoshop Foundations
Adobe Illustrator Foundations (66% complete, switched focus from web design to web dev)
Git Basics
Introduction to Programming
Javascript Basics

Codecademy (& other) Courses Completed:
HTML and CSS (Codecademy) 

Books Read or in Progress:
Completed: "Head First HTML and CSS," by E. Robson & E. Freeman
In Progress: "Eloquent JavaScript," by Marijn Haverbeke (On pg 27)
In Progress: "Head First Javascript," by Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson (On pg 56)
In Progress: "A Smarter Way to Learn Javascript," by Mark Myers (on pg 199)

My Progress on The Odin Project:

1.  Introduction to Web Development             100% Complete

2.  Web Development 101                                29% Complete

3.  Ruby Programming                                       0% Complete

4.  Ruby on Rails                                               0% Complete

5.  HTML5 and CSS3                                           0% Complete

6.  Javascript and JQuery                                  0% Complete

7.  Getting Hired as a Web Developer                 0% Complete

Hours Spent Coding Today: 2

Total Hours Coding: 595