Day 137: Ch. 82 "A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript"

All right, I'm starting today with Chapter 82 Form Validation: Text Field.  I'm almost done with the book, it's a fantastic book, and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn about JavaScript, it's the best JavaScript book I've come across so far.  The Head First series has some excellent books as well, with the strength there being the ability to work on larger projects.

Once I finish the book, I'm going to focus strictly on the Odin Project, because as much as I love working on these books, if I keep getting sidetracked, I'll never finish the course, and I intend to finish it.  

Ok, I got distracted with my 25 hour flight to Manila (Philippines) and with making preparations for the flight and trip, but I woke up two hours ago, and I'm ready to kick butt with my studying!  I'll be in Asia for two months this time (59 days), and my goal is to get an average of 7 hours a day of coding in every day here (not counting the last day, I'll be too busy with flights).  If I meet this goal, with 58 days of being here, that comes out to 406 hours (58 x 7), which would put me at over 1000 hours of coding (406 + 609, so 1015 to be exact). 

I'll be spending a lot of time with my fiancee, but on the days I don't see her, the plan is to invest my time wisely into coding, so that when I get back to the U.S. again, I'll be that much closer to being ready for a junior dev position. 

Also, my goal is to not watch any news while I'm here, and that includes no meandering web browsing.  The plan is to focus, focus, focus!

O.k., I finished chapters 82 and 83, and now I'm on Chapter 84 Form Validation: Radio Buttons.  Chapters 82 and 83 dealt with making functions that would validate form submissions, in order to reject submissions with missing inputs and alert the user to what those missing inputs are.  Adding the return keyword before the function name in the onSubmit field and adding "return false" at the end of the "if" part of these functions that are made to reject submissions with missing info was key to how these validation functions work.

O.k., I finished chapter 84, it was very similar to 82 and 83, except it dealt with validation radio buttons.

Now I'm on Chapter 85 Form Validation: Zip Codes.

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 271)

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: 611