We began with Pere Urbón Bayes’s Cooking Software 101, a high level overview of computing from it’s mathematical origins to modern day algorithms. With only 20 minutes to cover such an incredibly broad field it leaves a lot of pointers for beginners to explore areas of programming that they haven’t seen before. A browse through the slides is highly recommended.
Pere has also provided some extra links for people interested in learning more:
- Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures
- Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures
- Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
Next up we had Simon Jocker’s Web Standards 101. Simon introduced the fundamental concepts of current web standards: structured documents with HTML and styling with CSS. We also got to enjoy a bit of a history lesson with some classic 1990s web design. They just don’t make them like they used to!
The slides from this talk are available online:
Simon also recommends that beginners check out the Mozilla Developer Network, a great place for beginners to start learning about the web. This is run by the people behind the Firefox web browser, so they really know their stuff.
We rounded out the evening with round-table discussions on any topic that people wanted to discuss. It was great hearing about all the different things people were trying in their spare time. We even got a chance to do a little advanced turtling after our Python Beginners workshop:
OpenTechSchool would like to thank everyone for coming along: the beginners and coaches and organisers and everybody else. A special big thank you to Co.Up for hosting us in their event space. If you want to keep in touch then you can follow OpenTechSchool on Twitter or Facebook and join us in our Meetup group. We look forward to seeing you next time!
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://blog.opentechschool.org/2012/09/beginners-meetup-2.html