Try Code - An Interactive Guide
It's with great pleasure that I announce Try Code - an online, interactive coding tutorial for those with absolutely no programming experience.
Try Code is a simple tutorial which introduces coding in a fun, friendly and interactive way - through a simple Guess My Number game.
It focuses more on learning to code than on the nuances of a specific language. Although Racket is the language used throughout the guide, my goal was to focus more on general programming concepts and terminology, with a bit of history and math thrown in for fun.
The tutorial content itself is condensed from Chapter 2 of the book Realm of Racket - an awesome book that teaches you to code one game at a time!
How I Did It
Simple. I forked jarcane's Try Racket.
I did change the design and added some functionality - which meant I had to brush up on CSS and JavaScript - but jarcane (and others) did most of the heavy lifting.
As a side note, I firmly believe that JavaScript is a practical joke that got out of hand; like Soylent. Or Windows ME. Or Kim Kardashian.
Try Code does use a Racket Web Server, which sits behind a nginx proxy - and both are managed through daemontools.
The online REPL is built upon Chris Done's jquery-console, which is a fantastic terminal emulator.
Anyone interested in contributing or reporting issues can do so at the Github repo: https://github.com/arguello/trycode.io
The Design
What you see on the site is actually the 3rd design - Ariel said my first design "was the same boring blue stuff you see all over the internet," and that the second design was much better - but she thought the site was for 6 year olds.
I wanted the design to appeal to all sexes, and I settled on the Solarized Light color scheme. It's inoffensive and easy on the eyes.
It uses the Bootstrap Framework, which made things easier at first.
Bigger, Faster, Stronger
I plan on adding more to Try Code, and it will be awesome.
It will continue to revolve around games, although I would like to push out a math tutorial as well. And a web tutorial. And something around science.
Follow me @ffdtm for updates, and feel free to offer suggestions. Or content.
What's Up with Gabby and Ariel?
Ariel and I are still making our way through Realm of Racket. She felt that Chapters 3 and 4 were like "homework", whereas I found them to be very useful; but we're back into the games and she's having fun again. I do plan on maximizing my time by getting Gabby caught up and working with her and Ariel at the same time.
Gabby didn't want to start until she took her ACT exam, which is scheduled for today. We did run through some math with Racket, which really excited her - she's in her school's math club - and we did the Quick tutorial together. She enjoyed that, and we'll start on the Realm of Racket this weekend.