For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on freeCodeCamp advanced JS algorithm challenges, and on gaining some design skills. I’ve always felt like web development courses have ignored web design, so it was important to me to learn the basics. I’ve found a lot of resources this past week in particular that have really helped me out, so I wanted to share some of them.

Web Design:

I decided to hit up my local library and see what books they had on web design and checked a few out:

• Web Design: Start Here (Stefan Mischook)
• Web Style Guide: Foundations of User Experience Design (Patrick J. Lynch & Sarah Horton)
• Designing the Editorial Experience: A Primer for Print, Web, and Mobile (Sue Apfelbaum & Juliette Cezzar)

I’m still only part of the way through the first book. It’s good because it starts with the basics of web development, but is already leaning much more towards the design side of things, where previously that aspect has been ignored by all the online courses I’ve completed. [I totally get it though- what’s Code School or Codecademy going to do- tell you to ease up on border-radius??]

I’ve also started receiving the HackDesign emails, and I’ve signed up to receive emails from Design for Hackers. I’ve signed up for the Summer of Design lessons, but by the time this is published registration will be closed, so that link is to their main page, where they also offer other lessons!

Web Dev:

I don’t know how I didn’t discover some of the resources earlier- ignorance maybe?? I’m really not sure, but I’m glad I’ve finally found them!

• RegExr: A page to try out regular expressions and find what you need. Super helpful, with a cheatsheet for when you’re not too sure! I think finding this earlier would have made my first few forays into regex a lot more comfortable!
• 19+ Shorthand JS Coding Techniques: I’m still struggling to become comfortable with the shorthand if/else statement, so I’ve had this tab open on my browser for the past week.
• This short post about arguments.  I was really struggling to use the arguments properly in one of the freeCodeCamp challenges, and then I came across this post and suddenly it all made sense! Other explanations of array-like objects exist, but this one worked really well for me!