Programming By Stealth

In the very first Programming By Stealth supplemental episode, Allison interviews Dorothy Rendon, the programmer behind the PBS Index. If you haven't seen it before, it's an index that Dorothy has created for the Programming By Stealth students to helpt them find key topics in Bart Busschots's fabulous tutorial shownotes. allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/patreon podfeet.com/slack podfeet.com/facebook podfeet.com/amazon

Bart Busschots (successfully) explains the concept of JavaScript promise chains. It's a rough ride because of the subject itself, but he gets us there through his care and detail in explaining the concepts and of course his great examples. When he's done, you'll know how to chain promises together, you'll understand what data is passed through, and you'll understand why he says, "Don't have unhandled rejections, it's just not nice." You can find Bart's detailed shownotes at bartbusschots.ie/... allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/patreon podfeet.com/slack podfeet.com/facebook podfeet.com/amazon

Bart has been _promising_ us Promises for ages now and he finally fulfills his promise by explaining thenables. Promises are a tool to get us out of "callback hell", which we experienced a while back. I think he made us suffer through that so we'd appreciate Promises. In this episode he shows us the beauty and elegance of the concept but leaves us wanting more. Bart spent a lot of time trying to get the shownotes and his narrative to take this rather abstract concept and make it concrete, and I think he did a grand job of it. Bart's amazing tutorial shownotes are available at bartbusschots.ie/...

Bart Busschots and I both had a great time doing the challenge this week. In this week's installment Bart takes us through his homework not in a detailed step-by-step method, but rather he goes through some major structural ways he created his code. He digs deep enough to explain why but it's a great lesson on building code that's easier to debug and more fun to write. I got to be the tester of his code, and as I suggested improvements he decided he needed to use Bootstrap Popovers. He walks us through how they work and I have to say they're really slick. Then he introduces us to a super intuitive JavaScript library called is.js that solves will simplify our code. I asked Bart if he could back up 2 weeks and show me is.js BEFORE I did last week's homework! As always, Bart's awesome tutorial shownotes are available bartbusschots.ie/....

Bart Busschots starts this week's episode with a great refresher on what a callback actually is (because I have remained mystified by the term). He starts with simple examples and then shows us how we've been using callbacks all along and just didn't realize it. Then he'll walk through the challenge solution and the extra credit. He shows us how there's two paths to "callback hell", one through nested AJAX calls in parallel, and one with them in series (which sounds worse than it actually is. The challenge for next week is super open-ended which terrifies me but I'm sure it will be fun.

In this week's episode, we have another in our series Programming By Stealth with Bart Busschots. We'll spend the majority of our time talking about Bart's solution to last week's challenge. It's a great refresher on the methods he's taught us in the past, all rolled together with our newfound skills with Mustaches and templating. Then we'll get a start on using AJAX with jQuery and what sounds to me like a relatively easy challenge … except for that extra credit bit. Bart's extensive tutorial shownotes (and I really mean extensive this time) can be found at bartbusschots.ie/... Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and be sure to check out the #pbs channel to talk all things programming.

In this episode of Programming By Stealth we get the foundation to start learning about AJAX. Bart gives us an overview of HTTP that is really interesting. I learned so much that I didn't know about what you can see in a URL. I know this sounds super nerdy but I loved learning about query parameters and HTTP methods and even HTTP request headers and cookies.

In this week's Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us the last two concepts in Mustache, one of which is a real head bender and for me at least, the second was almost as hard. The first is how you can add an optional third argument to a Mustache view which is actually a function within a function. It's a very meta concept. The second is the use of Mustache Partials which are templates within templates. I expect you'll follow along faster than I did but I _think_ I got there in the end! You can find Bart's shownotes for this installment at [www.bartbusschots.ie/...](https://www.bartbusschots.ie/s/2019/03/24/pbs-74-of-x-more-mustaches/)

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us about Mustache Templates. Mustache Templates are a library that allow you to input any string and output a string. Unlike the ```template``` tag for HTML5, Mustaches are not restricted to HTML snippets. Mustache isn't the only game in town but it's Bart's favorite. I found this lesson fairly confusing along the way but when I got to the very end I think I understood it all! There was a key point in his instruction when he said to think of this as being like Mail Merge where you have a form letter and then a separate file that has the info that gets plugged into the form letter. Once he said that it became much more clear to me. Hope that little hint helps you too!

Last time Bart teased us that we were going to learn about the template library called Mustache, but he realized that he needed to teach us about vanilla HTML 5 Templates first. He starts by showing the problem to be solved: how messy and error-prone it is to create HTML elements using jQuery. Then he shows us how templates allow you to create multiple elements via cloning of the templates. The syntax is quite annoying, but I think once we get used to it, it will be pretty easy and efficient to use.

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots spends most of the time walking us carefully through each of the methods he used to solve the challenge from last time. He does a great job of reminding us of things we've learned, in some cases more than a year ago, and showing how they were applied for this particular problem. I'm quite proud of one little thing I discovered that Bart didn't know had been introduced in HTML 5. After he's done walking through the challenge, he introduces Bootstrap Spinners. Spinners are a visual indicator to the user that some operation is going on that will take some time and let them know that things aren't just broken.

In this week's Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart Busschots is back with another installment of Programming By Stealth. We'll shift gears a bit away from web pages to web apps as we explore the usage and code behind Bootstrap Modals and Toasts. It's a combination of HTML, Bootstrap for styling and JavaScript for actions so it flexes all of our programming muscles. We wanted to give a special shoutout to Caleb Fong, aka @GeekoSupremo for posting a link in the Podfeet slack to a fabulous cheat sheet for a ton of programming APIs. It's got JavaScript, Regular Expressions, Flexboxes, and lots of other things we've haven't yet learned. You can find the cheat sheet at freeCodeCamp at medium.freecodecamp.org. And as always you can find Bart's tutorial show notes at [www.bartbusschots.ie/...](https://www.bartbusschots.ie/s/2019/01/27/pbs-70-of-x-bootstrap-modals-toasts/)

In Chit Chat Across the Pond we are finally back to a Programming By Stealth episode. In this installment, Bart teaches us how to create navigation bars in Bootstrap. We learn how to make them collapse and expand to different device screen sizes and how to style them to look nice. We learned how to add branding and how Bootstrap makes it do logical things. It was an extraordinarily easy lesson because Bootstrap makes it that easy. You can find Bart's tutorial shownotes for this episode at [www.bartbusschots.ie/...](https://www.bartbusschots.ie/s/2019/01/13/pbs-69-of-x-bootstrap-navbars/)

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots introduces us to how Bootstrap will help us create navigation in websites or web apps. This is using what Bootstrap calls the Nav component. As always we'll learn how to style the navigation using Bootstrap Pills and Tabs. Then we'll take it up a notch and learn about Bootstrap Panes and how to reveal them within Bootstrap Tabs. As always, Bart's fantastic tutorial can be found at [www.bartbusschots.ie/...](https://www.bartbusschots.ie/s/2018/12/15/pbs-68-of-x-bootstrap-navs/)

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes into the land of Bootstrap dropdown menus. He explains the differences between dropdown and selects in HTML, and how there's two different kinds of dropdowns - menus and navigation. The descriptions of how to make the Bootstrap dropdowns takes a while, but when he puts the pieces together, the code is quite sensible. With any luck at all, I _think_ I have added chapter marks to the show to let you jump from the intro to the homework challenge and then to the new material. If this provides value to you, it would be swell if you sent me a note in some way about it.

HTML 5 gives us form validation for free, but it's not very nuanced. In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart will show us how to use Bootstrap to make our form validation a little less shouty and more useful for the viewer. He shows us how to take a little control, how to take a lot of control and how to take supreme control. That last bit scared me when he introduced it but he does a fantastic job of breaking down the building blocks for us. He builds up the form validation in logical steps, using tools we already know (but might have to dust off a bit.)

Chit Chat Across the Pond this week was Programming By Stealth installment 65 of X. This time Bart takes us through Bootstrap Input Groups. These are really cool. Think about a form that has information you have to fill in, but you're never sure what they're asking for. If they ask for money, what currency do they mean? Are you supposed to include the numbers after the decimal or not? With Bootstrap input groups you can put little symbols or words before or after the input field to make it obvious. As with all things Bootstrap, it's not something that can't be done in HTML, but it's so much easier to make them pretty and elegant without being a designer.

In this Programming By Stealth episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart Busschots teaches us about three more types of Bootstrap Form Layouts. It's not too tough of a lesson and we had a lot of fun working through the lesson. You can find Bart's full written tutorial at bartbusschots.ie/.... Support Bart on Patreon!

This week in Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots and I spend a fair amount of time going over the homework challenge from PBS 62. The nuances combined with some refresher on how the pieces fit together was something I really needed so hopefully I wasn't alone. The new part of the episode is dedicated to the all-important Bootstrap Button. We'll learn how to turn things into buttons and why you might want to do that, and we'll learn how to make Button Toolbars which are really slick and pretty. We don't have new homework for this week but if you're like me you need time to properly finish last week's homework. You can find Bart's tutorial and solution to the challenge at bartbusschots.ie/... Support Bart on Patreon!

This week's Programming By Stealth was great fun. Bart Busschots teaches us how to create a web form using the Bootstrap classes to do the job. He explains how Bootstrap literally insists that we make our code accessible, and how sensible it is to just that. We learn the importance of Form Groups, and how Checkboxes and Radio Buttons are a slightly different type of input to a form and so have their own Bootstrap class. It's great fun and the challenges look like fun too. At the end of the episode I added what Bart likes to call a Palate Cleanser. I've been following a woman named Samantha Ming on Twitter and samanthaming.com where she posts fun little CSS and HTML tricks. I learned how to make the caret on an input field blink in pink, and how to make regular HTML text on a web page be editable. Bart's tutorial for this episode is available at bartbusschots.ie/...