Thursday 20 September 2012

On-line learning at Learnable.com

Today I just completed a 9-lesson course at Learnable.com, called Javascript Programming for the Web. It consists of 9 lessons, each of which consists of a mix of videos and text to read. Each lesson also provides two versions of the source code, stored in Before and After folders. The source code consists of Javascript, HTML and CSS files. As the lessons progress, jQuery,js is added to the mix, and a few of its most powerful functions are called upon.

That's the only course I've taken at Learnable.com, but I'm sure it was the best on-line course I've ever taken anywhere. The instructor, Kevin Yank, has a wonderful manner that is informative without a trace of condescension, and he even manages to squeeze in a little humor here and there.

The course begins with the assumption that you know something about HTML and CSS, but little or nothing about Javascript. Starting from simple examples illustrating Javascript's data types, Mr. Yank walks the student through working with HTML and CSS elements by ID, ClassName, and TagName, working with the Document Object Model (DOM), event handlers and their more sophisticated cousins, event listeners, customized tooltips, accordion-style tables (whose nodes expand and collapse like a treeview), and ultimately a complex example illustrating animation techniques.

In summary, I was very impressed with the course, and plan to take more from Learnable. If the other material is as good as this course, it will be well worth the investment -- which, I should point out, is surprisingly inexpensive: a monthly subscription is only $17, and gets you access to all the courses you can handle; if you subscribe for a year, you get a discount.

Any interested readers are invited to browse the course curriculum at https://learnable.com/courses.

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