Programming By Stealth

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots continues on his series within a series explaining the version control system Git. We advance in our branching strategy by working several commits on our dev branch and then learn to use a merge commit to bring only the final commit into the main branch, leaving the half-working intermediate commits to exist only on the dev branch. This...

This week in our miniseries on learning the version control system Git, Bart dips our proverbial toe into branching. Branches allow us, as developers, to work on bugs or feature enhancements in a separate place from our stable code, and only merge the code back in when the bugs are squashed or the features are stable. We don't get much practice in this instalment, but rather Bart talks to us about...

As we continue to learn Git from the command line for version control, Bart teaches us some tricks to travel through time. First he shows us how to view more compact Git logs so we can just see a shortened hash and the first line of our commit message. Then he shows us how to pick out a single commit from the past and see what changed. Then he shows us how, with surgical precision, we can go back...

Bart takes us on a time traveling adventure with Git. By using commands like `git diff` we can see changes over time, but we can actually see older versions of the code in a couple of ways. Using the `archive` command we learned out to pull just the files at a certain point in time (without the history) and the more terrifying `checkout` command that creates a "detached HEAD"! Bart even explains w...

In our next baby step in learning to use the version control system Git, Bart teaches us how to track changes. We start by doing a bit of housekeeping, especially for Mac users to set Git to always ignore those pesky .DS_Store files. We learn how to stage and then commit a simple change, then we stage and commit multiple changes and even learn to see the differences in our staged files from the da...

After some quick revision from the previous episode, Bart explains how Git commands work with their subcommands. We start by looking at how to configure Git and the differences between local, global and system-level settings. Then we create our very first repo with an exciting README file, and we commit the file to our repo. It's a fairly simple lesson while laying down a good foundation for all f...

In our last Programming By Stealth we learned about the concept of version control, and the evolution from client/server version control to peer-to-peer version control and the creation of Git. In this installment we start learning the fundamental concepts of Git. We learn about the database, the working copy, and the index and understanding the difference is critical to effectively using Git. We...

It's time to take on a new subject: version control. As Bart explains in this week's episode, version control allows you make changes in your code and roll the changes back. This gives us the freedom to experiment and if an idea doesn't pan out, get back to where we started. Bart explains some of the origins of version control, starting with client server systems and then tells us how peer-to-peer...

In this positively _delightful_ episode, Bart and I celebrate 100 episodes of Programming By Stealth. When we hit 99 instalments, Bart declared that for 100, there should be cake! So I got Bart's darling beloved to deliver him a piece of cake right as we started, and Steve delivered one to him. To say that Bart was surprised and delighted would be an understatement! This episode is entirely dedica...

This week our guest is Dr. Helma van der Linden from the Netherlands here to talk about how she created the Taming the Terminal book using all Open Source software. On the NosillaCast I talked a lot about the book but I should probably give an explanation for the Chit Chat audience. Bart Busschots and I created the Taming the Terminal podcast and for this series on learning the macOS (and Linux) c...

Bart and I are taking a few weeks off from Programming By Stealth as we do every summer but we'd like to encourage you to check out the new Taming the Terminal episodes we'll be publishing instead.

This week Bart Busschots brings us the penultimate JavaScript installment of Programming By Stealth as he brings us part 2 of building with classes. This wraps up our third look at Object Oriented programming in JavaScript. We learn about the concept of inheritance, and how it allows us to build classes that inherit attributes and functions from parent classes. This allows us to eliminate code dup...

In this episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart explains one single concept, that of "Has-A". This is part 1 of 2, where next time we'll learn "Is-A" which is about inheritance. These both sound like odd terms but they're part of what makes object oriented programming so powerful. Bart spends 90% of the time going through a worked example which not only explains how classes can have instances of o...

I'm not going to lie to you guys, this episode of Programming By Stealth was pretty rough for me. It builds on the foundation Bart laid in PBS 95 where he introduced Getters and Setters and it was pretty clear that this previous lesson had not sunk in for me yet. I'll definitely have to go back and study PBS 95 a couple more times and get a chance to practice this Getter/Setter concept before the...

This installment of Programming By Stealth is a solutions show all about the clock assignment from PBS 92. Bart's been quite busy this week designing an entirely new distance final exam system for the university where he works so he asked if I'd take on half of the content by presenting my solution to the clock challenge. I have had an absolute blast on this assignment so I gladly accepted. I walk...

This week Bart explains how to give our JavaScript classes better data attributes via a very powerful JavaScript feature: getters and setters. On my first read through the notes for the episode, my head was spinning a bit, but Bart explains this so well using concrete examples (like a circle with a radius) that I think he got it through to me. When I told him up front that I struggled a bit when r...

In the early days of Programming By Stealth, Bart tried to explain JavaScript classes, objects and instances. He talked about it in Installment 17 before ES6, and then took another run at it in installments 27-31. But it never felt to Bart like he had explained it in a way that made it clear. In installment 94, Bart finally nails it. I told him the shownotes for this installment might be the best...

In this episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart takes us through the last "hat" that JavaScript objects can wear: encapsulation. As Bart walks us through the problems encapsulation solves using a funny NosillaCast-specific example, he shows how the code becomes reusable and sharable with encapsulation, and even more readable. You can read the tutorial shownotes as you listen at [pbs.bartificer.net...

CCATP #630 for March 14, 2020, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. This week our guest is Bart Busschots with PBS 92 of X in which he walks us through his solution to the assignment from PBS 89 to create a grid of currency conversions. He doesn't go through his code line by line, but rather gives us the big picture of his process. Most of the time he spent on the solution was actually in refactor...

This week our guest is Bart Busschots with an installment of something he's calling Programming By Stealth-adjacent. It's not part of the regular series of Programming By Stealth, and yet it's not technically very "light" in terms of the chit chatting. Since neither podcast is the right place for it, I've decided to put it in both podcast feeds to be wrong twice. Bart walks us through how to creat...

Bart takes us through the penultimate hat JavaScript wears and that's Regular Expressions. Luckily since we haven't talked about REs in ages, he reminds us of the syntax for Regular Expressions literals in JavaScript first and then he takes us through three common uses for Regular Expressions. We joked around during this episode at how many times I said, "That makes sense!" Bart said it was music...

Hope you enjoyed getting the little extra Tidbits episode this week. In this installment Bart continues our on-going mini-series looking at each of the proverbial hats JavaScript objects wear. Bart explains the concept of JavaScript wrapper objects that allow you to access properties of otherwise property-less primitives. It's pretty magical and I only got lost for a little while as we brushed the...

Bart explains how alert listener @lbutlr on Twitter found a mistake in Bart's math and he walks through how he figured out what was wrong and what we can all learn from it. Bart's explanation can be found here: bartbusschots.ie/...

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart explains his new plan for both the content of PBS and the way the shownotes are created and presented to you. Bart has noticed that because we put a challenge solution and new content into the same show, the solution gets short changed. That's a shame because there is so much he can teach by explaining the "whys" behind his design of his s...

Bart is nearing the end of his mini-series recapping al of the different hats JavaScript objects wear, doing a lot of redux to cement the concepts that have been spread over so many lessons. He takes a really interesting approach this week to his teaching. He explains a concept and then instead of having a contrived example, he shows us exactly how that concept works in action in his homework solu...