OdinProject/Markdown/TheOdinProjectNotes.md

The Odin Project

How to ask good programming questions

• Be very specific and patient
• use screenshots when available
• ask questions directly instead of asking to ask ie. "are there any java experts around?"

Git

Set up Git

• Set username and email

git config --global user.name "username"
git config --global user.email "email"

• If using GitHub, change branch from 'master' to 'main'

git config --global init.defaultBranch main

• Enable colorful output with git

git config --global color.ui auto

• Set default branch reconciliation behavior to merging

git config --global pull.rebase false

• Verify the config

git config --get user.name
git config --get user.email

Create an SSH Key for repos

• SSH keys are good for avoiding retyping credentials every time
  • Check to see if there is an existing ssh key

ls ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

- if nothing appears, then there is no key and one needs to be made

• Create ssh key

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C <youremail>

• press enter when asked for what location to store it unless you have a specific location
• add a passphrase and retype it

Link SSH key to Git

• Find the ssh key input on GitHub or repository website of your choice
• Click on new ssh key and give it a name and leave the window open for the next steps
• Copy the public SSH key

cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

• Paste the key into your settings, it should start with ssh-ed25519 and end with your email

Change git repository remote

git remote set-url origin https://'username':'password'@repositorylink

Using Git

• Check git version by using git --version
• After creating a new repository you can clone it to your current directory by using git clone <repolink>
• After the cloning, check the url with git remote -v
• Use git status to check the status of the current files within your directory
• To commit to the repo you can use git commit -m "Add helloworld.txt"
• Confirm with git status
• You can use git log to view the most recent commits
• After creating a file you can use git add <filename> to add that specific file or git add . to add all files within the directory that are not on the repo
• We can push the changes to the cloud repository with git push origin main, origin being the remote location and main being the branch to upload to
  • Make sure to only push working code

Git Best Practices

• Atomic commits
  • A commit that includes changes related to only one feature or task of your program.
    • Easily reversible if the commit causes breaking changes
    • Enables you to write more specific commit messages

Changing the Git Commit Message Editor

• Typing git config --global core.editor "code --wait" into the terminal will give you the option to use either git commit -m <your message here> or git commit without anything extra.

When to Commit

• These are best made when you think is a good time to take a snapshot of your current project
• Never commit code that isn't working to the main branch if it was working before
• It is considered best practice to commit every time you have a meaningful change in the code
  • Creates a trail to show how you got to the current iteration of the code
• Useful for when looking back to when the project feature was working to compare what you've changed

HTML And CSS Introduction

• What is HTML?
  • Stands for Hypertext Markup Language
  • It's the raw data that a webpage is built out of. Includes:
    • text
    • links
    • cards
    • lists
    • buttons
• What is CSS?
  • Stands for Cascading Style Sheets
  • It's the styling of the HTML page
    • Controls colors
    • Controls Positioning of text and font
• HTML and CSS are not programming languages, technically speaking because they only present information and are not used to compute any logic
• JavaScript would be a programming language that leverages both HTML and CSS

Elements and Tags

• HTML defines the structure and content of webpages.
• HTML elements are used to create:
  • paragraphs
  • headings
  • lists
  • images
  • links
• Elements are simply pieces of content wrapped in opening and closing tags
  • Another way to define them is containers for content
  • Paragraph is <p> </p>
  • Some tags do not require a closing tag
  • line break is <br> or <br />
  • image insert would be <img /> or <img>
• There many tags, looking at documentation for most of them is standard HTML Elements
• Intro to HTML Video 3:42

HTML Boilerplate

• All HTML docs have the same basic structure that needs to be in place before anything useful can be done.
  • index.html

The DOCTYPE

• Every HTML page starts with a doctype declaration
• The purpose of it is to tell the browser what version of HTML it should use to render the document(current being HTML5)
  • HTML5 Doctype is <!DOCTYPE html>
• The doctypes for older version of HTML were more complicated
• Example of doctype for HTML4

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

HTML Element

• Now we need to provide an <html> element. More commonly known as the root element of the document
  • root means that every other element in the document will be a descendant of that one
• The lang attribute specifies the language of the text content in that element
  • primarily used for improving accessibility of the webpage
  • en is used for English
• The <head> element is where important meta-information about our webpages and items required for our webpages to render correctly in the browser
  • inside of the <head> element, there should not be any element that displays content on the webpage

The Charset Meta Element

• The meta tag for the charset encoding of the webpage in the head element: <meta charset="utf-8">
• The encoding ensures that the webpage will display special symbols and characters from different languages correctly in the browser

Title Element

• Should go in the head of an HTML doc <title>My First Webpage</title>
• It's used to give webpages a human-readable title which is displayed in our webpages' browser tab
• The default title for a webpage is it's filename, in this case index.html
  • This is a security risk as you wouldn't want the internet to know what any of your files are named or how they are placed within the project directory
  • Also would make it difficult for the end user to remember what tab it is if they have multiple open

<!DOCTYPE>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8">
        <title>My First Webpage</title>
    </head>
</html>

Body Element

• All content will be displayed to users inside of this tag

<!DOCTYPE>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8">
        <title>My First Webpage</title>
    </head>

    <body>
    </body>
</html>

Viewing HTML Files in the Browser

• You can drag and drop an HTML file into the browser and it will open up the page
• You can also use a preview extension that will open a browser window
• In Ubuntu you can use the command google-chrome index.html to open it as well
• Using <h1> for the heading can render out a title on the page

<!DOCTYPE>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8">
        <title>My First Webpage</title>
    </head>

    <body>
        <h1>Hello World!</h1>
    </body>
</html>

• VSCode can generate the entire boilerplate by entering ! into a blank .html document

Working With Text

Paragraphs

• If text is not preceded by a <p>, then it will all clump together as one large body of text
• 
• 

Headings

• These use the <hx> tag where x is the number that changes the font
  • <h6> is the smallest font
• 

Strong Element

• The <strong> tag makes text bold
• It also marks text as important semantically
  • This affects tools like screen readers for visual impairments
  • It will change the tone of the voice for the content within the <strong> tag

<strong>Showing bolded wording</strong>

• 

Em Element

• The <em> tag makes text italic and also emphasises in text to speech
• 

Nesting and Indentation

• Elements are nested for legibility
  • Also known as parent/child/sibling elements
  • Similar to braces for code

<html>
  <head>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>
  </body>
 </html>

• 

HTML Comments

• Comments are not visible when the page is rendered
  • Useful for reading page format when performing maintenance
  • Comments are written with <!-- -->, where the comment is inside the whitespace

<h1> View the html to see the hidden comments </h1>

<!-- I am a html comment -->

<p>Some paragraph text</p>

<!-- I am another html comment -->

• 

Lists

• Lists are one of the most commonly usedd elements/data structures because they neatly organize many items

Unordered Lists

• The order is random or irrelevant, then using an unordered list is the right choice
• It's created by using the <ul> tag, with each element inside of the list using the <li> tag

<ul>
  <li>Item 1</li>
  <li>Item 2</li>
  <li>Item 3</li>
</ul>

• 

Ordered Lists

• Useful when the order of the list matters
• It's created by using the <ol> tag instead with the same <li> elements inside of it

<ol>
  <li>Item 1</li>
  <li>Item 2</li>
  <li>Item 3</li>
</ol>

• 

Links and Images

• Links allow for the chaining of other HTML pages on the web
• Create an index.html file and use it so link other pages within the odin-links-and-images directory

Anchor Elements

• The anchor element is denoted by the <a> tag
  • It creates a link with a separate page and routes towards it
  • Requires an HTML attribute in order to complete the link
• This link is known as a reference, <a href="https://www.theodinproject.com/about">click me</a>
  • the href attribute is what highlights text in blue to show that it is linked to an address
  • Links work for anything that has a web address, this includes:
    • photos
    • documents
    • pdfs
    • html pages
    • videos

Absolute and Relative Links

• Most links are one of two things:
  • Links to pages on other websites
  • Links to pages on our own website
• Absolute Links
  • Links to pages on other websites, in order to link you need the full address of the destination
    • Example: protocol://domain/path, www.https://youtube.com/home
• Relative Links
  • Links to other pages within our own website, or internal links
  • These links do not include the domain name since it is within the same domain
  • Relative links consist of the file path instead of the web address
• Links are created the same whether absolute or relative, the href tag is what controls the anchor binding
• Proper file management recommends to have a separate directory for pages within the project
• The proper way to direct an anchor to a subdirectory is by using ./ in the path
  • This tells the anchor to start looking for the file/directory relative to the current directory of where the index.html is located

A Metaphor

• The domain name town.com is a city
• The directory where the website is located would be similar to a museum /museum
  • Each page on your website could be considered a room, in this case a room within the museum /museum/movie_room.html or /museum/coffee_shop.html
  • Relative links like ./shop/coffee_shop.html are directions from the current room (movie_room)
  • Absolute link would be the full directions to the room from entering the town
    • Ex: https://town.com/museum/shops/coffee_shop.html

Images

• HTML uses the <img> tag in order to embedd images into the page, does not require a closing tag
  • These images can be added with Absolute or relative links Ex: <img src="https://www.theodinproject.com/mstile-310x310.png">
  • 

Parent Directories

• In order to navigate to the parent directory when linking, you should use ../ relative to the current directory

Alt attribute

• images also have an alt attribute
• Used to describe the image, helps with accessability and when the image itself can't be loaded
• Ex: <img src="https://www.theodinproject.com/mstile-310x310.png" alt="The Odin Project Logo">
  • This loads the logo, if it can't then The Odin Project Logo is displayed

Recipes

• Project to build a basic recipe website
• Will have a main index page with links to a few recipes