Hacks/Hackers Austin

Intro to Programming for Communicators

December 3, 2012 · 6:30 PM
Austin American Statesman

We've been talking a lot about programming, data and communication since the inception of our group two years ago. We've seen some interesting projects and collaborations. But now might be a good time to cover some basic programming skills, just to get everyone on track. This will be the first of several workshops that we can host over the next year to familiarize people with programming and Web development.

You don't need any prior experience with programming or Web design to attend. We'll start pretty promptly at 6:30pm, as opposed to our normal start time of 7.

In this 2 hour workshop, we'll cover:

Why do I need to learn to program?
Programming languages
Strings and numbers
What's a variable?
Math and concatenation
Alerts and prompts
Booleans - true or false
If Statements and Loops
Functions, Objects and Methods

You won't be an experienced programmer at the end of this session, but you will gain a better understanding of programming concepts and terms. We'll be using Javascript, which is a great language to complement Web markup, but we will discuss how these concepts apply to any programming language that you might use.

Bring a laptop. All you'll need is a browser and an html editor (a free one like Komodo Edit or Text Wrangler is fine) or text editor (Notepad or TextEdit). Or, it's fine if you just want to sit in and observe.

Note for TextEdit - before coming to the meetup, please go to Preferences and change the following:

Under New Document Tab, choose Plain Text
Under Open and Save, make sure the first two items are checked under "When Opening a File:"

Cindy Royal (cindyroyal.com) will instruct the group. She's been teaching Web design for the past 12 years, first as a phd student at UT and now as an Associate Professor at Texas State.

And, stay tuned for a message about the Web Dev Holiday Bash coming up in a few weeks.

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Charles Knickerbocker

This session showed me that I'm not a programmer nor do I want to be. However it did serve its stated goal of educating and sensitizing me of the effort that goes on behind the curtain to produce the stunning results we've come to take for granted. Thanks. I'll be a better member of a project team for this session.

0 · December 4