Frontend engineering @ The Iron Yard
- Luke Segars, Charlotte
The goal of this book is to introduce fundamental concepts to new frontend engineering students. Most of the content of this book is pulled in from other places on the web, though there are some custom bits as well. More information on all of these topics is abundant online and I encourage you to dig deeper.
The next few weeks will mark what will hopefully be a mind-blowing adventure that'll be both interesting and practical. In addition to learning the technical topics covered in this book, it's even more important that you begin to cultivate the mindset of an engineer and the desire to learn. Nothing will serve you better along this path in the future than those two things.
Using this material
This material will be most useful if you work through it before the first day of class. You'll get much more experience with all of these technologies throughout the course but you'll save yourself a lot of brain strain if you start to wrap your head around them now.
There are a few important ideas to begin to study, each covered to some degree here.
Mindset. This sounds fluffy but is what will determine your success more than anything else.
HTML and CSS. The basic syntax of HTML and CSS are a great intro to programming, and the reasons why we have HTML and CSS (and why there isn't just one big language) is also a good question to think about.
The command line. Most people are used to graphical user interfaces (icons, drag-and-drop, etc). We'll be making heavy use of the command line in this course (very, very common in industry as well), and most people are significantly less familiar with command line when getting started.
Git and version control. Mind-blowing until you start wondering how you lived without it. This is how developers collaborate on projects and one of the tools we use to protect ourselves from our own mistakes.
Programming, a la Javascript. We'll be dedicating boatloads of time to this in the course, but you'll help yourself if you get familiar with
ifstatements,forloops, variables, data types, and other fundamental ideas of programming languages.The internet. Frontend development is heavily focused on the web, so its important to understand how it works in order to build fast, delightful applications. We'll also be working with the backend class and need an understanding of why we have frontends and backends and what the difference between them is.
Each section has a list of things you should do to learn the fundamentals for each topic, as well as some resources for diving deeper. If these materials don't cut it for you, explore around online for other content that may cover the same topics. Feel free to ask questions or share links on your class's Slack channel.
Promises and expectations
The Code School Manifesto describes both the promises we make and what we expect in return. This course will be difficult for most; it's intended to push you and stretch your brain in potentially unfamiliar ways.
Check out your class policies for specific expectations on your campus.