Web Presence | Know Your Tool | How Internet Works | HTML & CSS | JavaScript | Capstone
Welcome to the official Vets Who Code Prework. Here you'll find resources and tutorials on the topics that will be covered during the interview process to be eligible for admission into a cohort. This can also be used as a great refresher for grads and newbies interested alike.. While, we don't expect you to be experts, but we do expect you to be familiar. There is a lot of content to consume here, get used to the fire hose! 👨🏻🚒
We know that everyone learns better using various methods and styles which is why we included both videos and read-throughs. Knowing the best way you pick-up and learn will be one of your greatest assets as a developer!
You should have a professional presence on all of the below platforms, as well as a professional email account. A personal brand is really important.
Another important aspect of communicating your brand on the Internet as a developer is being able to use Markdown formatting. Markdown is a way to write plain text documents that get formatted into html for display on the web. This guide you're currently reading is written in Markdown. Markdown is extremely popular in 2018 and as part of the prework, you're going to take some time to understand it.
Markdown Tutorial
Markdown Cheatsheet
Being able to code well requires you to be able to use your machine well. We're going to start with setting up your machine and then move into learning a few tools that are staples to web development. If you're on Windows your setup instructions are here, MacOS users look here.
There are many options when it comes to which editor to choose and we (and many others in our industry) prefer VS Code due to it's efficiencies and ability to customize. Download it here and play around with it to become familiar since you will spend many hours in this environment!
Next up, learning what the heck the command line is. Dig in! You wont be the same after you learn how command the terminal. Work through this tutorial here! Here's a great tool to decode some of those spell like chunks of texts you've been blindly copy pasting into your terminal. 🔮
Git is used to track who changed what on files, as well as many other things. It's going to be one of your top tools, so bookmark the documentation. Next, if you're on Mac run brew install git, else if you're on Windows run choco install git.install. Now, work through this hands on tutorial, don't worry it's really quick. Now take a look at Gitflow, it may seem a little advanced, but this is how we use git within Vets Who Code. The reason is because that's how the real world works with Git.
Guides (don't worry too much about reading all of these. Wet your pallette and bookmark for later)
Guides (don't worry too much about reading all of these. Wet your pallette and bookmark for later)
Download Chrome (This is our browser we prefer for our dev environment.)
Devtools in your browser environment (such as Chrome) will be your best friend and best resource to see what is going on behind the scenes. If you ever have a project open in the browser and the inspector/dev tools are not open "YOU ARE WRONG"! Lets get familiar with this tool in this tutorial!
Dev Tools Tutorial (READ)
Dev Tools Tutorial (VIDEO)
These two articles will help you see the context of what we do as web developers. First, by understanding the infrastructure that delivers web applications and web sites. Then, by understanding how the various layers of software involved in computing today abstract complexities behind code.
Below is a tutorial covering what web development is, what web development is comprised of, as well as how it all comes together to create web applications. The tutorial mentions installing Atom, don't worry about that. You're going to use Vscode instead. 😉
Getting a good grasp of how to layout websites is VERY important. The course below is going to get you moving on just that with some cool new additions to CSS.
JavScript is where you go from being an artist to being a wizard in web development. A deep knowledge of JavaScript fundamentals will make you a highly employable developer. Here are two tutorials to get you started, pick whichever one grabs your attention -- JavaScript for Cats or Learn JavaScript. If you're feeling extra motivated (you should feel extra motivated), do the JavaScript 30 course by Wes Bos and see web development in action.
JavaScript is derived from ECMAScript. This is important since new versions come out having major impact on JavaScript. Read through this resource to understand the newewst version of ECMAScript:
Javascript Inf0(Read-very intensive)
Build a website telling us your story and then push it to GitHub. Bonus points if you use GitHub Pages or surge.sh to host your site.
NOTICE: DO NOT USE A TEMPLATE OR THEME IF USING THIS PREWORK TO APPLY FOR VETSWHCODE. USE ONLY YOUR OWN HTML, CSS AND JAVASCRIPT.