The purpose of our precourse material is to make sure that everyone is familiar with the key concepts we will be using throughout your time here. A solid grounding in the fundamentals will help you immensely.
Please make sure you have finished the precourse material and installed the software on our Installation List before day 1 of your course.
We will be having an installation party shortly before you arrive. If you are using a Windows OS then attending this installation party is crucial. But if you are unable to attend, you can also do this by yourself. If you run into any difficulties, please get in touch.
Please do not forget that we don't use frameworks at FAC – ignore Bootstrap and JQuery, and make sure you work in vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
If you have any problems with the following material, feel free to reach out to your peers and FAC Staff through your cohort's Slack channel!
Learning outcome:
Be familiar with navigating around your computer without using a Graphical User Interface (GUI).
Resources:
Learn Python The Hard Way has a great Command Line Interface Crash Course.
Learning outcomes:
Understand the purpose of using Git and GitHub
Know basic git commands like git add, git commit and git push
Resources:
Udacity's git & GitHub course is a brilliant set of videos. The course is quite long, so don't worry about completing the whole thing. We will go into more depth in week 1. For now, just complete lesson 1 (Navigating A Commit History section).
Learning outcome:
Know markdown syntax well enough to create readmes
Resources:
No GitHub repo is complete without proper documentation. Follow this markdown tutorial to learn the syntax that you need to write a banging Readme!
Learning outcome:
Be familiar with accessible HTML5 elements.
Resources:
Here is a 6 minute youtube video to introduce you to the concept of the semantic web. You will be expected to write semantically during week 1, so brush up with the following:
Read this article to stop using too many divs (divitis). Don't be fooled by the scroll bar - the article isn't particularly long, but there are many comments below.
Head to this article for more specific examples of useful semantic tags.
Learning outcomes:
Be able to apply positioning and layout techniques to solve common problems
Understanding basic CSS rules
Understand the differences between em and rem units and how to combine them effectively
Resources: This section includes condensed articles/videos that will be beneficial when tackling CSS throughout the course;
Learn Layout is a helpful, lightweight, well-ordered guide that covers a lot of concepts in CSS to help you understand how to create a super basic layout. Additional links are provided in each section for more detailed explanations of concepts.
Relative & Absolute Positioning this great 7 minute video will cover the position property, after watching you’ll be able to apply positioning techniques with layout techniques from the Learn Layout video to accomplish many important tasks like centering.
CSS Specificity is an essential guide to understanding how CSS rules are applied and how CSS works in general.
Rem/Em Units this is another essential guide to help you understand the differences between em and rem units and how to combine them effectively.
Learning outcomes:
Understand what the DOM is
Create, access, and style a DOM element
Resources:
Call Me Nick - DOM Manipulation Basics (archived version) will cover a lot of the basics.
MDN article on "Manipulating Documents" - useful for some further reading, if you'd like
Appspot's DOM Tutorials: Exercises 1,2 & 3 only will help put that into practice.
Bonus videos:
The DOM: What is the Document Object Model? (includes some jQuery, but provides a useful overview and some vanilla JS examples)
Learning outcomes:
Understand what a relational database is
Select, Create and Manipulate data between tables
Resources:
Code Academy's Introduction to SQL - At a minimum, tackle section 1, hopefully section 2 and if you're having fun then section 3 and 4!
Playing around with creating tables and accessing the data on your local device will increase your confidence in week 6 - feel free to reach out if you'd like a practical project to work on with SQL!
Learning outcomes: Cement your knowledge of the concepts above through practical application.
Task:
Build a calculator. This is one of the "Advanced Front End Development Projects" on Free Code Camp. Having a look at their guidelines might help you to get started.
Rather than using Codepen or JS Fiddle, you should do this directly with your text editor, terminal and browser. Start by creating your repo on GitHub and stick to the command line for adding, committing and pushing your changes as you go.
Make sure to host your project on GitHub pages.
If anyone has already made a calculator and feels that they need a different challenge, please message one of us. Have fun, and don't hesitate to use your Slack channel!
Install Brew
Optional: iTerm2
Distro
Base
Package Manager
Ubuntu and Linux Mint are probably the two most used desktop Linux distros out there. Mint is becoming increasingly popular and in a lot of ways, is more beginner-friendly than Ubuntu. It also uses up less memory resource (the most lightweight Mint edition is XFCE), and will be better suited to slower machines.
For the course you'll need to install a Linux operating system on your machine and dual boot - students in the past who have tried to use Windows always encounter big setbacks with installation problems and general incompatibility issues.
Be sure to back up your files before you start, in case anything goes wrong. You will still be able to use Windows alongside Linux and if everything goes right, you won't lose any data.
It's not as scary as it sounds! There are a lot of articles online to help you. Due to a lot of different OS configurations you may be best off searching google for your specific OS + distro (eg: "dual boot windows 10 and Ubuntu"). However here are some links that may be useful:
We shall have a couple of FAC students and alumni available at the installation party to guide you through installing linux. Please come along if you have Windows OS.
Finally please do not hesistate to come to a meetup or contact us on slack if you are having trouble, we can help!
If you're having hardware or permissions issues when dual booting, you may be able to use Windows Subsystem for Linux. If you're going down this route, please make sure postgres is installed correctly too.
Chromebooks all now officially run Linux and setting it up on older machines is pretty simple, too.
Install and manage Node.js using nvm.
Note: We will be covering Node.js during the course. If you are curious and would like some background reading, Art of Node is a great resource.
Install a text editor of your choice. We recommend:
VS Code - because of it's source control and liveShare features
Install Chrome
Install Postman
Chrome extensions:
JSONView
Make sure to explore your editors plugin ecosystem for useful plugins:
VSCode Marketplace - we recommend prettier and Rainbow Brackets
Download the Slack Desktop Client - the interface is easier to manage the different workspaces you'll be part of
...but don't be overwhelmed, you don't need to install anything further