Matthew MacDonald's Blog

Finally off to the printers! I had a great time contributing to this one—it’s a cookbook-style guide for problems and practices with modern JavaScript, from fiddly things that frustrate you (closures, promises) all the way to Node, React, and GraphQL. Shout outs to the previous author Shelley Powers and Adam Scott, the real brain behind this edition. (He also has an excellent tutorial-style guide to building JavaScript apps called JavaScript Everywhere—check it out!

The JavaScript Cookbook a...

150 pages. 35 fun and interactive exercises on CodePen. No setup required (just a web browser). Available in print (good) or as a a PDF ebook (even better). Best of all, it’s free!

You can get more more details (and the story of why I wrote it) on the Gumroad project page. Happy coding!

The post New Release: A Tiny Introduction to JavaScript appeared first on ProseTech.

It’s been a while! The first edition of WordPress: The Missing Manual was released almost exactly 8 years ago to a very different world. Websites were complicated, web hosts were stingy, and video hosting was a luxury. Today the world is radically different, but WordPress has only grown in popularity, now accounting for a staggering one third of all websites in existence. If you need a modern website and you don’t have a team of coding ninjas on hand, WordPress remains the best choice.

And if...

In the past decade, the world has gone crazy for code-themed education. There’s an iPad app or robot caterpillar for every age. Many of these toys and games are perfectly fun activities that do very little to teach actual computer science concepts. To be kind, they overpromise. (To be less kind, their claims are bunk.)

That doesn’t mean we should teach our kids to code in the same way we teach adults. When it comes to interest and concentration, kids are all over the map. Some might be perfec...

There are plenty of ways to help your kids learn the basics of HTML. (Im a fan of the no-nonsense videos at Khan Academy.) But when it came to teach my own daughters, they wanted something that seemed a little more fun. Sitting down for a long lecture about angle brackets wasnt going to cut it.

To fill the gap, I wrote Messing Up the Web, a micro-introduction that lets kids start playing and experimenting at the same time that theyre learning how the web works. Heres what you need to know to...

I have a confession to make. Before I became a respectable developer working with modern curly-bracket languages like C# and Java (and that hot mess of a platform we call JavaScript), I was a dedicated fan of the wildly popular misfit Visual Basic.

My infatuation started honestly. As a preteen I learned to program with the BASIC language. But not just any BASIC. I started off in M...

Interesting story–my first ever book was written for the excellent No Starch Press almost two decades ago. Despite writing many books since, our creative paths never crossed again… until now!

Yes, I’m tiptoeing into the very fun but very competitive kids market with HTML & CSS For Kids (expected release: early 2020). If you’re interested in an advance review copy, hit me up with an email sign up for my newsletter on the bottom of the Young Coder homepage.

And if you don’t already know No Star...

About a month ago, I launched the Young Coder publication at Medium to cover the field of kid coding and STEM education. Young Coder isn’t mature yet, but it’s slowly growing up.

Recently we published a couple of stories about alternative approaches to teaching computer programming. If you’re tired of Scratch and coding games, you might want to consider these ideas:

Recently, I’ve been thinking about kid coding and the world of tech education.

My children are just starting to take their first steps in tech. They’re experimenting with HTML, trying out different programming languages, and playing with plenty of STEM toys.

Unfortunately, the world of kid coding is filled with wild promises and overinflated hype. Parents and educators are so worried that children will be left behind in a fast-changing world that they promote any product with tech in the titl...

10 years ago I wrote a book for O’Reilly that remains one of my favorites to this day. The book—Your Brain: The Missing Manual—is still in print, and every once in a while I get an email from a reader who’s stumbled across it and discovered something weird and wonderful about the squishy gray matter inside our heads.

When it comes to human weirdness, I love pretty much every topic. But if I had to choose just one favorite part of Your Brain: The Missing Manual, I know what I’d pick.

At the ti...