Programming By Stealth

We finally reached 500 episodes of Chit Chat Across the Pond (episode 499 will be next week) so who better to have on the show than Bart Busschots who started it all? In our first Programming By Stealth after our summer vacation, Bart decided to do a retrospective on what we've learned to date from HTML to CSS to JavaScript. I thought it was a great episode because it refreshed my memory on so muc...

I've been asking Bart a lot of questions in the back channel as I struggle to understand the documentation he has provided in our latest few sessions of homework assignments. He had an epiphany last week that he had never explained the documentation methods itself, which was certainly adding to my confusion. He decided to take a step back and explain step by step using video. He created a video sc...

Chit Chat Across the Pond this week is another episode of Programming By Stealth with Bart Busschots. I'm very proud of the fact that I completed my homework, writing a program from scratch that passed all of the tests written by Bart. It took me 12 hours, and nearly 4 hours of Dorothy's time helping me do it, but I got 'er done. In this installment, 36 of x, we learn some more HTML, specifically...

In this installment, Bart walks us through a little bit of how he wrote his Test Driven Development with QUnit for the Bartificer Link Toolkit. Bart even explains how it helped him find a couple of pretty major bugs in his own code, proving how important this is. Then we make a start on text input in HTML forms, and we move on to formatted sub-stets of tea like numbers, email addresses and so on....

In this installment of Bart’s Programming By Stealth series, we review our test code using QUnit, and then learn how to use QUnit to test our code within a real browser page. We do that using the API we built together, the Bartificer Link Toolkit that identifies external links on a web page, makes them open in new tabs, adds the tag rel=noopener, and adds a cute icon to identify them as external l...

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart FINALLY lets us start learning Test Driven development, or TDD. He shows us how to use a free and open source tool called QUnit, made by the fine developers of jQuery, to analyze our test code. It’s something I’ve been itching to learn more about, ever since listener Jill tipped us off to the concept. It’s a really fun episode where everything ki...

This week Bart and I put the finishing touches on our Date and Time prototypes, then we use those very JavaScript prototypes with HTML forms, we learn bout JavaScript error handling (including throwing and catching errors) and the we start manipulating HTML Selects with jQuery. If that sounds as fun to you as it was to me, check out Bart’s full detailed show notes at pbs.bartificer.net/...

Bart and I may have broken a record on Chit Chat Across the Pond this week. We went through so much material in Programming By Stealth that this show runs 100 minutes! The funny thing is that I wasn’t ever bored, it was all really interesting. We started by going over last time’s JavaScript challenge where I made some mistakes but node.js saved me so I didn’t realize I’d entirely missed the point....

Bart continues his current dual path of teaching. We learn how to compare JavaScript objects (spoiler, you can't use == or === to do it). After that he teaches us how using WAI-ARIA as we develop our code will make it accessible to screen readers and other assistive devices. We don't do any real coding in this section; instead he explains the foundation for what we'll be doing in the future.

I don’t want to jinx anything here, but I feel like I’m finally starting to “get” this JavaScript programming thing. In this episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart starts by talking about how we solved the challenges from last week, getting rid of “bad smells” by learning how to reuse our code. Then Bart teaches us about another bad smell, where inadvertently point two variables point the same ob...

In this week’s installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us about how to change the look of HTML buttons using their CSS attributes. It’s great fun, but I have to confess we don’t actually get to the new stuff till over an hour into the show! We had so much fun going through the homework from last time that we lost track of time. I was so excited because I’d worked really hard on my home...

On this week’s continuing series Programming By Stealth, Bart introduces us to HTML forms in order to take user input. It’s a pretty basic installment so not as head bendy as they have been lately. He also gives us some more repetitive homework to get more practice creating and using prototypes and accessor methods. The full written tutorial can be found at bartbusschots.ie/… .

Bart Busschots is back with another installment of Programming By Stealth. In this week’s episode we wake Allison up from her long winter nap away from programming and continue our work on our JavaScript clock. The goal is to create a better API for our clock so that we can publish it and have it be used by others. My personal goal is to have a secure clock I can display on https://podfeet.com/liv...

Bart gave me another two weeks to get my homework done on Programming By Stealth and brings us a case study of how to create a JavaScript API on Github. He uses a real life example of a small, open source library he released over the weekend called barfificer.linkTookit.js. This library includes many of the bits and pieces we’ve been working on in Programming By Stealth, how to add a rel of no ope...

In this week’s installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us how to create a JavaScript API up to and including an easy way to create professional documentation in order to publish our work as a JavaScript library. In order to get there we learn how to write reusable and sharable code, how “closures” help you keep your variables out of the global scope so they don’t mess up other people’s...

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, we’re working towards our first truly practical assignment in the series – a function that finds all links on a page, and if, and only if, they lead to an external page, alters them to open in a new tab, and appends an icon indicating that fact. Bart’s amazing full on tutorial is over at bartbusschots.ie/… . I also mention a fun little jQuery Easter e...

Bart Busschots joins us again for his continuing series called Programming By Stealth. In this episode Bart explains how to embed JavaScript into a webpage, how to control when JavaScript executes and then teaches us about the browser event model. Using this model he teaches us how we can change things on a web page when the user clicks or after a defined length of time, or at time intervals. It’s...

In this episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart ties up the last of the loose ends related to web forms. He teaches us about form events, which are critical to making our web forms not only accessible to screen readers but to allow our users to tab around to the different fields and interact with them without using a mouse. We learn about the keypress event and learn what it means for 31 to be the...

In this installment of Programming By Stealth with Bart Busschots, we finally break out of the sandbox and learn how to use the console in a web browser to start taking control of web browsers. Bart's full tutorial is available at bartbusschots.ie/… .

In episode #449, Bart Busschots walked us through how he'd solve the first half of the JavaScript challenges from PBS 19 . This week we finish the second half of the 5th problem about Complex Numbers. Like the last episode, we're giving you the audio in the podcast, but if you'd like to watch the video of Bart building the solutions, you can see that over on podfeet.com.

Bart Busschots got the crazy idea that we should do this episode as a video so that he could solve the JavaScript challenges from PBS 19 real time and talk through it as he solved them. I figured it would be mean to drop a giant video into your feed, so this is actually just the audio which is cool too, but you can go watch the video on podfeet.com.

In this episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes us through the final stages of learning JavaScript within the playground. Now that we know about objects, we need to re-visit the arguments object present in every JavaScript function. We need to take a detailed look at the typeof operator, and we need to look at some built-in objects and functions JavaScript provides. We also need to...

In this continuing series with Bart Busschots, we get a more detailed look at objects, and then we look at some standard functions and objects that are built into JavaScript. We also take a proper look at two operators we've seen before, typeof and instanceof. Bart's full written tutorial is available at bartbusschots.ie/... .

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes our understanding of functions to the next level. The techniques we encounter today would be considered advanced techniques in most other languages, and you could spend years developing in Java and never encounter an anonymous function. However, because of how JavaScript is integrated into HTML documents, these techniques are cons...

In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart Busschots is back with Programming By Stealth episode 15 of x where he's going to teach us about JavaScript functions. he'll twist our brains a bit with recursive functions but it's a fun ride. And there's even a challenge at the end! And as always, here's a link to Bart's terrific tutorial for the episode: bartbusschots.ie/...