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Code Conquest Newsletter #2
Feb 27, 2013
Contents:
- 25 Places to Find Coding Puzzles
- Zuckerberg, Gates, Will.I.Am on Learning Code
- Advanced: Remove HTML Comments with PHP
- Quotation of the Week
1. 25 Places to Find Coding Puzzles
A great way to sharpen your coding skills is to solve problems like these…
- Print sum of first 100 numbers
- Print first 50 Fibonacci numbers
- Check if a number is a prime
- Et cetera.
Every coder must appreciate the mental exercise that coding puzzles bring. SkilledMonster.com recently released a list of no fewer than twenty-five websites, such as Project Euler, where you can try out coding puzzles.
You can view the full list of all 25 websites here…
http://www.skilledmonster.com/programming/websites-to-challenge-and-sharpen-your-programming-skills/
But wait! Before you have a hope of solving a coding puzzle, you have to first learn a coding language.
If you’re yet to learn a coding language, why not head over to Treehouse and get started? They have a course called ‘Introduction to Programming’ which uses the JavaScript language and is ideal for beginners.
https://www.codeconquest.com/reviews/treehouse/
Then, when you’ve got some basic skills under your belt, you can try your hand at some of those coding puzzles! Best of luck.
2. Zuckerberg, Gates, Will.I.Am on Learning Code
In last week’s newsletter, we shared a video in which President Obama announced his support for required high school coding classes. This week it’s Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Will.I.Am, amongst many other famous faces, who have all appeared in a short 9-minute film by Code.org.
Will.I.Am says in the film, “Here we are, 2013. We all depend on technology to communicate, to bank, information, and none of us know how to read and write code.”
The film also remarks that one million jobs in America may go unfilled because 90% of schools don’t teach coding.
To view the film, click the below link…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU1xS07N-FA
As we said last week, you don’t need to be a student at a school that teaches computer science, to learn code. You can simply sign up for Treehouse instead. Treehouse has a focus on taking you from knowing nothing about code, to being job-ready.
https://www.codeconquest.com/reviews/treehouse/
3. Advanced: Remove HTML Comments with PHP
It’s always a good idea to get into the habit of commenting your code.
If code commenting is new to you, this page explains it…
https://www.codeconquest.com/advanced-programming-concepts/code-commenting/
But when you think about it, there’s no real benefit in sending your comments to your users, as they’re invisible and have no effect on the end result. Web developer David Walsh has written a PHP function that removes all HTML comments before the HTML gets sent down to browsers. This of course reduces the size of the HTML source.
Here’s the code David recommends:
// Remove unwanted HTML comments
function remove_html_comments($content = '') {
return preg_replace('//', '', $content);
}
And here’s the original article:
http://davidwalsh.name/remove-html-comments-php
To use this function, simply pass in your HTML as an argument to the function.
4. Quotation of the Week
“Coding is very important when you think about the future, where everything is going. With more phones and tablets and computers being made, and more people having access to every thing and information being shared, I think its very important to be able to learn the language of coding and programming.”
– Chris Bosh
NBA All-star, Miami Heat
All the best,
The Code Conquest Team
Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers.