Attending the Codecademy

You've probably already got it, I'm surveying several sites to improve programming skills. This episode is about Codecademy.

It's a very well done site, for people that want to learn a language. It has a Python track, along with several others: Ruby, JQuery, Javascript & so on.

You'll be required to actually write code and run it! yes, the code you write is then executed in a web "interpreter" (modified for educational purposes) and the output displayed on screen. In a section is also possible to write to files and have their contents shown on another tab.

I'd encourage you to start from it if you never saw Python and you're willing to learn if from the ground up.

Spending a Sunday on CodingBat.com

I've played a bit with Project Euler but all of their problems are math-centric, which is nice but not exactly what I'm looking for: some real-world programming problems to get back into the coding field.

So asking my friend Google, I found CodingBat: it has a Python section with several tasks to complete. I must say they are some kinda trivial to solve, once you know some idiomatic Python code, but some are a bit more interesting. If you're a junior Python coder, or want to get a grip on the language, give it a look.

Oh, and if you know some website that would give me some real-world programming coding problems (something that would be useful on the job, not just coding for fun), I would love to hear you.

Tune google-code-prettify for Blogger dark theme

Following up my post about using google-code-prettify to syntax highlight code on Blogger, I want to share what I did to tune it for a dark theme.

Big warning: I'm completely ignorant of any web development, html/css/js are kinda arab (no offense intended) for me, so I'm quite sure there are more elegant solutions to this, but at least it works, and seems to have broken nothing :)

So, the default CSS has some bad values for tokens colors, in particular for the keywords and tags (that are in dark blue) and for the plain text (that is in black, so completely hidden).

What I did was to simply override those values, using this table as reference; so now the code to add to Blogger "Minima Black" template (the one I'm using) is:

<link href='http://google-code-prettify.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/prettify.css'
    rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>
<style type='text/css'>
.pln { color: #C0C0C0; }
.kwd { color: #4169E1; }
.tag { color: #4169E1; }
</style>
<script src='http://google-code-prettify.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/prettify.js'
     type='text/javascript'>  </script>

Code syntax highlighting on Blogger

Blogger has no feature to highlight code syntax in blog posts. But google-code-prettify comes to rescue.

The information in their README are quite generic, and treat the situation where you're directly managing the website files, which is not the case for Blogger.

Luka Marinko wrote a very nice blog post describing how to use google-code-prettify on Blogger; I'm going to follow his advices right away!