Becoming a Math Person -v .1

I’ve always been able to learn on my own, if only for the fact that I don’t allow any subject to intimidate me. I understand that all knowledge has some value and can be interesting if approached with the proper intent. That being said, there have been certain subjects that until the past few years I have not made a good enough attempt so that anything would sink in.

One of those subjects has been math. In college I did enough to fulfill the math General requirement. That being said, I’ve always appreciated math. It affords the wielder, the language of physics, and thus the very principles upon which the universe itself is built. It is foundation to hard and soft sciences alike. Thus, I will be noting here my path to turn myself into a math person.

It is worth noting that for the past two years I have been learning coding for web development, so I have developed a basic level of technical and procedural thinking.

Learning Master List -v 1.0

One of my biggest passions is learning new things. In my teenage years I had a hobby of collecting new hobbies. As such I became aware of a number of resources free and available online. I’ve also become privy to some ways to gain access to resources that might otherwise cost money.  This article will serve as a repository of all the free resources I am aware of and will grow as I discover more. I may also add summaries as well.

 

General

https://www.khanacademy.org/

http://oli.cmu.edu/

https://www.edx.org/

Free-ed.net

coding

https://thegymnasium.com/courses

https://www.freecodecamp.com/

https://checkio.org/

 

Languages

https://www.duolingo.com/

 

Strategies

The Library Back Door

There are some websites that do have a membership fee. Sites like Lynda.com and Team Treehouse are such examples. I learned that libraries purchase group memberships to offer website services to the libraries members. Often having a library card is enough to be able to access these websites.

Posting about posting (Part I) -v.20

One of the problems I’ve been trying to figure out is how to take a d3.js graph and populate it with data from a database. I have been working through this tutorial to better understand posting to a database and retrieving the data. Having gone through the tutorial, I’m taking the resulting pieces, changing the type of data being posted and am working on resurrecting the data.

I’m still not understanding whether I should build the charts so they render via the server or if there is a way I can draw the data from the database by making a request to the server from the front end. I’m sure my understanding is incomplete at the moment. I am researching front end frameworks to see if there is anything that can make this easier for me.

The objective here is to create a chart that updates live,  so it would make sense to use a framework that does data-binding. I know angular is popular but I have been wary of it as I know it is going through a major change to 2.0 so for now I’ll use knockout.js which seems to offer the functionality I’m looking for.

In trying shortcut my understanding how d3 and knockout might work together, a google search on how to combine the two brought up this tutorial, which I hope even though it is a little old will provide some insight. In skimming over the tutorial I realize I need to get a better understanding of the knockout api, so I’m going to immerse myself in the documentation for a bit to try and grasp it better. My main interest is in understanding how it interacts and integrated with a mongodb database.

As I dig more into the learning knockout.js I realize in order to make my data more accessible I may need to create some kind of restful api for my basic CRUD app so that I can better access and manipulate the data. I’m going to dig into the knockout.js first and play with it and after I get a handle on it I’ll put together a restful api, most likely with some kind of library such as restful.

Blog -V .01

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This isn’t my first attempt at blogging but hopefully this will be my most successful attempt. I’m starting this blog primarily to parse and sort my thoughts about learning to code, though you’ll probably find that I’ll post about the other things I’m trying to learn as well. For you, dear reader, I hope that some of these ramblings may incite insight into some of what follows. Let my struggles serve as your advantage.