Learning Flash by watching videos is a very efficient way to learn specific techniques without going through books or online tutorials. As I mentioned in a previous post about online learning, there are many website that offer video tutorials on different web technologies including Flash.
LearnFlash.com is one of them and they offer one of the largest selections of Flash video tutorials.
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If you want to build modern web sites, you need to know about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS gives you the power to style and lay out web sites so they are usable, compact, good looking, well structured, and easy to maintain. The basic purpose of CSS is to allow the designer to define style declarations, and to apply those styles to selected portions of HTML pages using selectors which are references to an element or grop of elements to which the style is applied.
As we have started to learn about the DOM this season, one thing that is an issue when developing your scripts is knowing when you can have your scripts execute. Remember, the DOM is available to you only when it has finished loading in the browser. You may ask, when has it finished loading? Good Question!
Every browser offers the document it displays for manipulation via something called the Document Object Model, or DOM for short. Older browsers supported their own DOMs, but there is a standard one, defined by the W3C, that is supported by most browsers these days.
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced a security update to Internet Explorer that changes the way it handles web pages that contain ActiveX controls. This would affect any control (Flash, video plug-in, etc.) that uses the APPLET, EMBED, or OBJECT tags. Basically the control's user interface is blocked until the user activates it by clicking on it or hitting the space bar when it has focus.
Once you learn the basics of PHP, you will want to know how to interact with a database and update its data from a web page. MySQL is the most obvious and recommended choice using PHP and is fairly easy to setup.
You can use phpMyAdmin to easiy setup your MySQL database, tables and perform any necessary SQL statements.
The Image object is one of the more useful objects in JavaScript because it gives you the ability to manipulate any image within your web page. What we covered today in creating dynamic "roll-over" effects are just part of what you can do with image objects.
A difficult topic to understand is the concept and use of objects. Knowing this concept will help you use JavaScript more effectively and any other programming language since almost of them use objects.
We now have gone through the basics of JavaScript in these past 4 meetings and are ready to cover topics that you can readily adapt to your existing web pages. Next meeting we will be covering images using roll-over effects that are used in many websites today.
Here is a video (.zip) giving you some more explanation of what objects are, narrated by Dori Smith.
Have a safe and happy holiday and I'll see ya next year!
Events are what allows JavaScript to interact with the user of your web page. There are four types of events: mouse, keyboard, HTML events and DOM events. The most common events are click, mouseover, mouseout, load, unload, submit and change. To respond to these events you must use the corresponding event handlers which are JavaScript keywords that are used within HTML tags.
Here is a video (.zip) summarizing many of the events that can be accessed via JavaScript, narrated by Dori Smith.
