The best method of getting in touch with the instructor regarding
course material is at class, or use the course forum by following the
link in the left frame.
For office hours and email address follow the link in the title frame.
JSLint
Check JavaScript syntax. It is very strict and imposes style conventions
in addition to syntax. I set the following options to remove "errors"
that are not errors.
a browser — Otherwise get errors saying
undefined variable for standard browser global variables.
many var statements per function
Messy white space — ignores your layout style
The error message "unnessary else" when an else-block follows a then-block
that terminates with a return or throw is bad advice. The else is there
to clearly show the structure of the logic. If you remove the
else to remove the error message, then if in the future the
return or throw statement is removed, you will likely forget or not notice
the missing else, and thereby introduce an error into the program. On the
other hand, if you leave the else in, then removing the return or throw
statement will not introduce an error in the logic.
All of the work creating and editing web pages and JavaScript files is done using
a text editor.
Macs
TextEdit comes with OS X. TextEdit can display HTML documents as you’d see them
in a browser (although images may not appear in some cases). Or, you can use
TextEdit as an HTML editor. To learn how, use TextEdit Help and search for
html documents and a link to Work with HTML documents will be
displayed.
I use Xcode as my text editor because I develop apps for iPhones and
iPads (they are programmed in Objective-C; C augmented with object oriented
features), and prior to version 4 Xcode could be used build Java programs
(for which I now use Eclipse).
You can also download and install freeware or shareware editors such as the following.
Eclipse, while it is for Java,
it has tools for HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and a plug in for autocomplete
for jQuery.
About the Firefox Browser
The Firefox browser is available for free and runs on Macs and on the various
Windows operating systems. You can use other browsers
such as Safari and Internet Explorer but it would be best to use Firefox, as
are some differences between browsers.