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Innovative User Interfaces—You Have Likely Never Seen User Interfaces Like These

Advancing User Experience on the Web: 23 Innovative User Interfaces Components

March 13, 2019

For years, I have been fascinated with user experience and user interfaces, and I spent innumerable hours devising and developing new user interfaces. But I had so many new concepts for user interfaces that I couldn’t possibly develop them in my lifetime, so I was honored to ask the students at Bov Academy to develop them for their own benefit.

Crux

When I created Bov Academy, an innovative programming educational institution, one of the exciting things we include in the program is innovative UI development. Students get to develop the innovative UI components I conceive, and thus get the honor of developing a unique experience for the web that we haven’t seen before.

Indeed, we like to push our students to go beyond their perceived limits, as you can see in some of the complex and innovative UI components below.

Introduction

I conceptualized dozens of innovative user interfaces that the frontend engineers students at Bov Academy develop as part of their training at the academy. The innovative UI components will be part of Evolution UI,

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March 13, 2019

Everything You Want to Know and Should Know About Becoming a Programmer and Succeeding as a Programmer

Do you have the capacity to become a programmer? What do you need to succeed in programming? What are the different programming jobs, their responsibilities and qualifications and salary, and where can you learn each? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each type of coding school? Learn the answers to these and dozens of other must-know details about becoming a programmer, improving your skills, and working as a programmer.

June 21, 2018

Are you thinking about changing your career to become a programmer or software engineer? Are you already a developer and want to modernize and upgrade your programming skills and earn a bigger salary and a more exciting programming job?

If you do, I have written this comprehensive roadmap for you; it comprises a series of 20 articles, and they cover everything from the different kinds of programming careers and what each entails and the average salary for each, to the advantages and disadvantages of the different programming educational institutions (boot camps, accelerated programming academies, MOOCs, etc.), to interviewing and getting a programming job. Indeed, I cover everything, yes, everything, you want to know and should know about becoming a programmer or improving your programming skills for a better programming career.

I am hopeful these articles—all listed in the table of contents below—will allow you to make a fully informed decision before you make the monumental commitment to start your training for a programming career.

Articles in this Series
  1. Why Now Is the Best Time Ever to Become a Programmer,

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June 21, 2018

Understanding ES2015 In Depth, Part 1: Block Scope with let and const

February 1, 2018

About the ES2015 Series

This series, Understanding ES2015 In Depth, will give you a thorough understanding of some of the most recent additions to ECMAScript, the scripting language also known as JavaScript, which powers the modern Internet as we know and love it.

About the Author

Dan Wellman is an author and web developer from the UK. He’s written nine books on using JavaScript frameworks and libraries including YUI, jQuery, and jQuery UI, and is a regular contributor to Envato’s Tuts+ code courses. He is also Lead Front-End Developer at Bluedoor DST and Curriculum Director at Bov Academy of Programming, where he has written the highly acclaimed course Becoming a JavaScript Expert.

Dan has previously worked as a Front-End Engineer at Microsoft.

About this Post

This post, Block Scope with let and const, lays the foundation of your ES2015 knowledge by giving you a solid foundation in the fundamentals of the different scopes available in JavaScript, the different scenarios that cause scopes to be created,

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February 1, 2018

Learn Meteor.js Properly

October 9, 2014

At the end of this article, I outline two comprehensive study guides to help you learn Meteor properly. The study guides are for both beginners and seasoned developers. The first study guide, which uses a book, a paid screencast, and some free online resources, teaches you how to build a sophisticated, modern social-media web application with Meteor. And the second study guide, which uses only free resources (one affordable screencast and free online resources), is just as instructive as the first, though you won’t build a specific web application throughout the course.

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First, I give a comprehensive Meteor overview, in which I discuss just about everything you want and need to know about Meteor before you commit to investing your time and other resources in this still burgeoning though exceptional technology.

Time to read the Meteor Overview:

14 minutes

What You Will Learn in this Meteor Overview

I explain exactly what Meteor is, how it differs from typical JavaScript frameworks, what it offers developers specifically,

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October 9, 2014

Beautiful JavaScript: Easily Create Chainable (Cascading) Methods for Expressiveness

August 13, 2013

(Part of the “12 Powerful JavaScript Tips” Series)

Prerequisites:
— Understand JavaScript’s “this” With Ease
— JavaScript Objects in Detail

Chaining Methods, also known as Cascading, refers to repeatedly calling one method after another on an object, in one continuous line of code. This technique abounds in jQuery and other JavaScript libraries and it is even common in some JavaScript native methods.

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Writing code like this:

$("#wrapper").fadeOut().html("Welcome, Sir").fadeIn();

or this:

str.replace("k", "R").toUpperCase().substr(0,4);

is not just pleasurable and convenient but also succinct and intelligible. It allows us to read code like a sentence, flowing gracefully across the page. It also frees us from the monotonous, blocky structures we usually construct.

We will spend the next 20 minutes learning to create expressive code using this cascading technique. To use cascading, we have to return this (the object we want subsequent methods to operate on) in each method. Let’s quickly learn the details and get back to eating, or watching YouTube videos,

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August 13, 2013

JavaScript’s Apply, Call, and Bind Methods are Essential for JavaScript Professionals

July 10, 2013

Prerequisite:
— Understand JavaScript’s “this” With Ease, and Master It.
— JavaScript Objects
— Understand JavaScript Closures
(This is an intermediate to advanced topic)

Duration: About 40 minutes.

Functions are objects in JavaScript, as you should know by now, if you have read any of the prerequisite articles. And as objects, functions have methods, including the powerful Apply, Call, and Bind methods. On the one hand, Apply and Call are nearly identical and are frequently used in JavaScript for borrowing methods and for setting the this value explicitly. We also use Apply for variable-arity functions; you will learn more about this in a bit.

On the other hand, we use Bind for setting the this value in methods and for currying functions.

We will discuss every scenario in which we use these three methods in JavaScript. While Apply and Call come with ECMAScript 3 (available on IE 6,

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July 10, 2013

16 JavaScript Concepts JavaScript Professionals Must Know Well

July 9, 2013

(Essential JavaScript Concepts for Modern JavaScript Development )

If you plan to work as JavaScript Professional, you must know some JavaScript concepts and JavaScript-related web-development technologies, particularly as a modern JavaScript developer. If you know the 16 concepts enumerated below, you have the skill necessary to build world-class modern JavaScript web applications, and you are set for the near future—0 to 3 years.

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I will expound on each of these sixteen concepts, and I am hopeful all of us will have become better JavaScript programmers by the time we get through all of them. I have completed most of the 16 concepts with just a few more to go, so keep reading and learning. And sign up for the newsletter to get the latest updates.

I trust you have learned JavaScript properly or you already know JavaScript enough to build a simple JavaScript-only web application. While the 16 concepts note below are neither complex nor difficult, you will understand them best if you already know at least some basic JavaScript.

The sixteen concepts that every modern JavaScript developer should know well follow:

  1. JavaScript Objects in Detail
  2. JavaScript Prototype in Plain,

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July 9, 2013

Understand JavaScript’s “this” With Clarity, and Master It

July 5, 2013

(Also learn all the scenarios when this is most misunderstood.)

Prerequisite: A bit of JavaScript.
Duration: about 40 minutes.

The this keyword in JavaScript confuses new and seasoned JavaScript developers alike. This article aims to elucidate this in its entirety. By the time we make it through this article, this will be one part of JavaScript we never have to worry about again. We will understand how to use this correctly in every scenario, including the ticklish situations where it usually proves most elusive.

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We use this similar to the way we use pronouns in natural languages like English and French. We write, “John is running fast because he is trying to catch the train.”

Note the use of the pronoun “he.” We could have written this: “John is running fast because John is trying to catch the train.” We don’t reuse “John” in this manner, for if we do, our family, friends, and colleagues would abandon us.

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July 5, 2013

Learn HTML5, CSS3, and Responsive WebSite Design in One Go

May 6, 2013

(You will also learn HTML5 Boilerplate, Modernizr, and Twitter Bootstrap 3.0 responsive website layout)

Prerequisite: Familiarity with basic HTML and CSS
Duration: 2 – 3 days (about 18 hours)

We have learned quite a bit of JavaScript, but we must take a break from JavaScript briefly and learn HTML5 and CSS3, because we need both, along with JavaScript of course, to build modern web applications and websites.

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Both CSS3 and HTML5 are just about fully supported in all modern browsers, and we there are techniques in place to patch old browsers that lack support. So there is no disadvantage to using CSS3 and HTML5 today. The opposite is true, however: there are many painful, frustrating disadvantages with forgoing HTML5 and CSS3.

You may already “know” a bit of HTML5 and a touch of CSS3 (or perhaps you probably know enough old-school HTML and CSS), and with this knowledge, you might have thought you needn’t learn HTML5 and CSS3 fully.

The crux of the matter is that after you complete this course,

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May 6, 2013

OOP In JavaScript: What You NEED to Know

March 19, 2013

(Object Oriented JavaScript: Only Two Techniques Matter)

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Prerequisite:
JavaScript Objects in Detail
JavaScript Prototype

Object Oriented Programming (OOP) refers to using self-contained pieces of code to develop applications. We call these self-contained pieces of code objects, better known as Classes in most OOP programming languages and Functions in JavaScript. We use objects as building blocks for our applications. Building applications with objects allows us to adopt some valuable techniques, namely, Inheritance (objects can inherit features from other objects), Polymorphism (objects can share the same interface—how they are accessed and used—while their underlying implementation of the interface may differ), and Encapsulation (each object is responsible for specific tasks).

In this article, we are concerned with only Inheritance and Encapsulation since only these two concepts apply to OOP in JavaScript, particularly because, in JavaScript, objects can encapsulate functionalities and inherit methods and properties from other objects. Accordingly, in the rest of the article, I discuss everything you need to know about using objects in JavaScript in an object oriented manner—with inheritance and encapsulation—to easily reuse code and abstract functionalities into specialized objects.

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March 19, 2013
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