AppJet Offers Browser-Based Coding How-To, Hosting

theodp writes "Know someone who wants to learn to program? Paul Graham advises programmer wannabes to check out The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming on the Web from AppJet, which aims to be 'the funnest and easiest way for a beginner to get started programming.' Setting the guide apart from other tutorials is the ability to edit and run any of the all-Javascript examples directly in your browser. Newcomers to programming and experienced developers alike can also publish their AppJet creations on the web. Sure beats GE BASIC on the General Electric Time-Sharing Service!"

Comments

by "funnest"

[crenshawsgc]

When they say "funnest" I assume they mean "most fun," correct? I'm not a programmer but from what I understand, proper syntax can be important. When the site designers have gotten a better grasp of the English language, I'll trust their programming advice.

Re:by "funnest"

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the majority of them are the ones who have to abide by the syntax of an existing language.

Re:by "funnest"

[jellomizer]

Well most languages have a small set of fixed syntax and a wider set of custom made syntaxes.

Remember the old joke about the programmer having trouble getting his code to compile, and some guy (a non-programmer) looks at it quickly and proudly proclaims "Oh, I see the problem. You spelled studio wrong."

Re:by "funnest"

[morgan_greywolf]

Actually, the majority of them are the ones who have to abide by the syntax of an existing language.

Unless you happen to be Guido van Rossum. In which case, you don't even have to abide by the syntax of your OWN language! :-P

(Note to humorless, Python programming mods: Guido is my personal hero and Python is my favorite interpreted language. Really.)

Re:by "funnest"

[lysergic.acid]

i had no idea that "funnest" wasn't a word.

actually, i'm still not quite sure. a search on reference.com yields:

No results found for funnest.
Did you mean funnest (in dictionary) or Fingest (in encyclopedia)?

Dictionary suggestions:
funnest
fun nest
fun-nest
funniest
...

i'll just go with funniest.

How true is this?

[Arkitus]

From the intoduction page: "JavaScript is the most prevalent programming language in the world". Something tells me this ain't true... Aren't we getting a little carried away with Javascript?

Set apart from?

[ah.clem]

http://www.w3schools.com/ - I use this site to get undergrads up to speed with the programming we do in our shop at the university. It's always worked well, and all the code is runnable in the browser. Pretty good info, too.

ah.clem

Cool idea, but one peeve so far...

[pla]

Another way to find images for your web app is using Google Image Search. When you search for an image and click on a result, you can also click on the "See full-size image" link at the top of the page. This will take you directly to the image in your browser, and you can copy the URL from the browser's location bar, and use that with AppJet's image command.

So by the third page, they already have you stealing bandwidth by deep-linking images?

Cool site, but I really hope they have a section on netiquette somewhere in there...

Re:Cool idea, but one peeve so far...

[pla]

D'oh! Okay, before you all smack me down, they do indeed mention that as unkosher. Somehow I completely missed that paragraph on my first read.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...

Re:Cool idea, but one peeve so far...

[lysergic.acid]

or how about this. if you don't want your images indexed by Google, add 2 short lines in robots.txt:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/

i imagine most webmasters don't mind if someone links to one of their hosted images in a forum post or saves it to their hard drive for personal use. it's only a problem when:
a.) the hotlink is made from a site like /. which generates huge volumes of traffic.
b.) the image is being used for commercial purposes.
c.) the webmaster is a douche.

if you're a douche, please don't pollute the google image search results with links to your site. google image search provides a useful service to people looking for images online, and also to webmasters who gain traffic from the search results. if this isn't a fair trade to you, then it's very easy to tell google not to index your site (or just particular sections of your site).

now, some people have very limited bandwidth, so they may want to share their images, but don't want hotlinks. this is very understandable. and most of these webmasters know to prevent outside referrals to images by configuring their web server with the right access rules.

but if everyone acted like a bunch of tightwads, then Google Image Search would be completely useless. frankly, i'd rather people hotlink images directly from my server for forum posts than to to use a throwaway image host like PhotoBucket and thus contribute to the sea of dead images that you see on internet message boards.

Does it teach the importance of good libraries?

[MikeRT]

I used to HATE getting into JavaScript before I found JQuery. When I first got into it, I converted a web app that had pages of DOM manipulation code into a series of small chunks of JQuery code. A conservative estimate is that JQuery eliminated 60% of the hand-written DOM manipulation code and such.

As a contrast, my wife works with a woman who didn't get to use any library, and had to code everything using just the base JavaScript APIs. After several months, she had a bloated beast that barely did anything because she had to implement so many things herself, rather than just making a few calls to JQuery here, or Prototype there.