Hey, happy summer! It wasn’t too long ago that we did our last giveaway, but the weather is getting toasty, and we figured you might need a good summer read. Plus, we find these giveaways to be a lot of fun, and we hope you do too!
By now, we assume you’re familiar with the Professional WordPress books written by Brad Williams, David Damstra, and Hal Stern. The third edition of Professional WordPress was released in January, and since then we’ve done two giveaways of the book (and a few other small goodies). To kick off a bright and beautiful season, though, we wanted to go bigger. Like the sun.
This time around, we’re giving away a copy of Professional WordPress (signed by Brad, naturally), and in addition to that, we’re also giving away a one year membership to the Apple Developer Program. Yup, you read that right! We are mighty privileged to be a part of this community of developers and designers and WordPress lovers, and we wanted to give something back that’s extra sweet for you folks.
Let’s keep this short and sweet and simple: As per usual, click through to the Rafflecopter to enter! As we did last time, if we beat 250 entries, we’ll give away some rad Maintainn t-shirts and stickers and other goodies as second and third place prizes.
Good luck!
My advice to anyone learning to code is simple: When you are going crazy and thinking about quit, jus dont, keep trying to figure it out. (at least it works for me every single time) and not only code but life in general 🙂
If you are new to learning code, make some other friends that are learning code so that you can study together. Also, the Chrome Inspector is your friend.
it’s okay to “phone a friend” to help you figure out if you are on the right track to get to the solution.
When reading through a book or tutorial to learn coding, take the time to type out the examples within the book and run them on your computer. If you already know the coding standards for the project you intend to work with, such as WordPress, then when you type out the code correct it to use those coding standards. It’s not necessary, but if you’ve already learned where spaces should go in the code to make the formatting look nice then it’s better to always use that rather than reproduce the code exactly as the book/tutorial had it.
Once you’ve got the example working then try tweaking it in tiny ways. Printing out “Hello, World!” can become “Hello, World! Yes, I used an exclamation mark and am apparently excited!” Change the number of times a loop executes. If the code found a list of even numbers then see if you can make it find odd numbers instead. As you make changes, even seemingly insignificant changes, you’re forced to focus on how exactly the code works, better improving the odds you can use those techniques yourself in the future.
Finally, after finishing your experimentation with the code and finish the chapter/tutorial, some people will try to use flash cards to really solidify the concepts in their head. You can do that (I use Quizlet), but try taking it a step further and asking yourself a few questions about what you learned. Almost like a self-interview. “How would you _____?” “What is the disadvantage to using _____?” Write the questions down and ask yourself again the next day. If you can’t remember the answer, don’t kick yourself. Just look up the answer. Then wait a couple more days and ask yourself the questions again. Then again in 3-4 days. Then a week. Then a couple weeks. Spaced repetition, particularly increasing the period between each repetition, seems to work better for long term retention. Plus in the future if you decide to apply for a coding job, you’ll be prepared for the interview because you’ve been interviewing yourself all along.