Monthly Archives: April 2012

Digital Shoreditch

Posted on by

Coding For Kids Books will be at Digital Shoreditch Inspire Day which is taking place on Monday 21 May 2012. Come along and see a whole host of organisations who are there to show you what’s happening in the field of education and beyond.

We have Workbook 1 back from the printers and will have some examples on display at the show! Come and hear what we have to say. We’re on stage at 2.00pm on Monday.

The official release date for Workbook 1 is 21 May 2012.

In the meantime, the team has started preparing Workbook 2. It’s due for release in July 2012 and you’ll be able to work on it over the summer. That also means that your teachers might be able to have a look see as well!

Managing Folders and Files

Posted on by

Once you have XAMPP installed and running on your computer, your browser will be able find your files under localhost. Visit the Hardware and Software report if you need to know more about installing the right tools. Under XAMPP, the default address for localhost is . . .

http://localhost/xampp/splash.php

That link will give you an error if XAMPP is not installed yet.

If you already have XAMPP running on your machine, and then you click on the link above your browser should take you from this web site to the heart of your own computer and you should find yourself looking at something like this . . .

Once that happens, you know you have XAMPP up and running.

The next thing you need to do is keep control of your projects. We do that by keeping each project inside it’s own folder. And periodically, when we have progressed a bit, we copy the files to a newer folder and keep working from there. Then, if anything goes horribly wrong, we can go back to an earlier version of our project and start working (again) from the last known good version.

This is the way that we do simple version control. If you know any devs, they will tell you to use GIT because it’s a bit of software that does version control in a different and more professional way. When you are more advanced, you can try out GIT. For now, we recommend that you use folders for version control. It’s simple and it’s easy to understand.

You will have to keep your projects in the xampp work folder below the htdocs folder below the main xampp folder, because that is where localhost expects to find them!

It’s normal to build and test everything on your own computer first. Then, if you want to, you can upload your web apps to your own web site. Don’t upload all the earlier versions, just upload the one that works! And make sure that the folder structure on your web site follows the pattern that you used on your computer from the xampp work folder downwards.

Hardware and Software

Posted on by

We have worked on a variety of computer systems and most of the time we use the set up shown below, running either on a Windows XP machine or on a Mac under Lion. That doesn’t mean that you have to do the same! There are plenty of alternatives out there which will work, so feel free to mix and match.

Windows

Mac

Linux
Browser

Firefox

Safari

Firefox
Text Editor

Crimson Editor

Smultron

Vim
Web server

XAMPP

XAMPP

XAMPP

You will need a web server. Your own computer (if it has 512Mb RAM or more) is perfectly capable of running a web server and we recommend that you download XAMPP from Sourceforge by clicking on the link above. Sourceforge is a respected provider of quality, virus free, software for the dev community and for others.

A quick search of the web will lead you to the alternative web servers for your OS if that’s what you want.

Windows

Mac

Linux
Alternative web server

WAMP

MAMP

LAMP

We prefer using XAMPP (some call it ZAMP and some call it EX-AMP) because it provides us with a uniform user experience across all platforms. XAMPP stands for

X

 Cross platform

A

 Apache the core “web server” application which understands HTML etc

M

 mySQL a powerful tool for managing relational databases

P

 PHP a popular programming language (from about 1999 onwards)

P

 PERL a popular programming language (until about 2001)

Many professional web servers out there on the internet, run on Apache. The professionals may use fully packaged collections like XAMPP (because it contains Apache) or they may just use a collection of the exact bits and pieces they want.

The team that built XAMPP did it as a free open source project, and have not updated it since 2005. By all means run XAMPP on your own computer as a learning tool. But, take advice before trying to use it as a DIY system and installing it on your own bit of the internet. In any case, if you’re like us at CFK Books, you’ll be renting your web space from a bigger organisation, and they will be providing the back end services (like Apache) to make your whole site work.

That means that if you have a personal web site, and you know how to FTP your files, you can simply plonk the right files in the right folder, and (assuming you wrote it properly) your PHP and HTML should work fine.

Have a look at Managing Folders and Files to see how to keep track of the work that you do on your own computer.

Why?

Posted on by

The team at CFK Books includes adult coders, junior coders and ex teachers. And between us, we hope to provide you with a selection of projects which you can really get your teeth into!

The overriding objective is to get more kids to give coding a try. Some will like it, and some won’t, but we know that by getting them started at an early age that some of them will take to it like a duck to water. That will enable the right kids with the right talents to take this further and to really make a difference.

In the UK we have one big advantage over the rest of the world. We “invented” the English language. And coding is done in English – well, sort of! Even if coding languages do look challenging at first, they are actually in English! Now, imagine if you were in France, or Russia, or China, and you had to learn to code?

This is an opportunity which the UK government should seize now, before it’s too late. If the economy is in a mess, what could a contingent of highly sophisticated UK coders do about it? Build worthy solutions which export markets would actually want to buy. But first, we need more coders.

How can you learn to code? By giving it a try. It’s like riding a bike. You can only really learn by doing it. It’s our job to give you the chance to do just that!