Week 2 is on!

It had to happen eventually. Yesterday was the first weekday since I started at Coder Camps that I didn't blog. Yesterday I literally lived the Coder Camps mantra "eat. sleep. code."

So here's the make up post.  What did we learn yesterday? In the morning we covered Bootstrap. Learning what it is (that much I already knew), how to install it on a Visual Studios solution, what its dependencies are, and of course, we got in some practice using it.

In the afternoon we talked about object constructors and prototypes. This was another example of how expert instruction really helps. I've used both object literal notation and object constructors before (and a little bit of prototypes) but I only had a partial understanding of how to computer treated them differently.

Yesterday drove home how, especially when dealing with large numbers of objects, using prototypes to define common methods can result in significantly less memory being used. The trade off is that that call of that method on any given object will execute slightly slower. For client side code this is a bargain of a trade off as the speed difference will, general speaking, be undetectable to the user, while the memory difference can be significant.

On the server side, where speed is a larger factor you might create the object at need with methods including, foregoing methods in prototypes to obtain the more efficient execution, then destroy the object as soon as you no longer need it to manage memory.

Lest I forget, we also had an aside on JSON and XML.

Next we practiced as a group, creating a simple app to implement CRUD^*, using object constructors.  Our homework, and the reason I had no time to blog last night was to finish the app - it still needed delete and sort functionality, and more CSS styling when class was done for the day. Then create another app on our own that did essentially the same thing as the first one ("code pushups" per our instructor).  Oh, and reading on API's and AJAX.

Not bad for day one of week two of camp huh?


* CRUD: Create, Read, Update, and Delete. Four essential functions of a web app.