I just finished AngularJS 1: Building a Data-Driven App with Ray Villalobos. As usual with lynda.com courses, it was really great.

Learn from My Problems

I ran into a couple confusing problems. The first problem was with my test data and the filter query. I was searching for the first name or last name, and it appeared the search was not working. This was because the same email address (not shown on screen in this case) was used on all the dummy entries and was matching my query.

Another problem I ran into was with the last exercise for deleting love. I thought it was working fine, but then I noticed I was not able to delete an individual love item. If I had more than one love item, deleting one would delete them all. I’m pretty sure this was just an oversight since Ray included the “award” parameter in the function. You can add the “award” parameter from the “deleteLove” method onto your “refLove” Firebase reference (as shown below) and you’ll be able to delete individual loves.

$scope.deleteLove = function(checkinId, award) {
	var refLove = new Firebase(FIREBASE_URL + 'users/' +
		$scope.whichuser + '/meetings/' + 
		$scope.whichmeeting + '/checkins/' + checkinId +
		'/awards/' + award);
		var record = $firebaseObject(refLove);
		record.$remove(award);
}; //deleteLove

Next up! I am going to try Watch and Code with Gordon Zhu. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be really excellent. I will report back after I finish the free sample!

I just finished AngularJS 1: Adding Registration to Your Application with Ray Villalobos. It was excellent. As usual Ray explains things clearly. He’s a great teacher.

This was my first introduction to angular and also firebase

Angular doesn’t seem extremely difficult to pick up so far. There are many concepts I don’t fully grasp that well yet because I don’t have much formal education in programming, but I’ve learned it’s okay to keep going even if you don’t completely understand everything (because you’ll never understand everything!). Sometimes I took a detour from the course to research some details in more depth, and there is an abundance of excellent info available on the web. This can be good, but can go on and on and on. I think it’s best to focus on the course. This course took me three evenings at Starbucks after work. I’m sure the Starbucks people are getting to know me.

Of course I followed along in my own editor. This is essential because you get to experience first-hand a little debugging and those little problems you can encounter when the editor autocompletes something when it shouldn’t or commonplace typos.

Firebase seems really incredible. I can’t wait to really dig into that.

For my local development environment I used Laravel Homestead, which worked great. You can probably find some free tutorials on how to use it on Laracasts.com