Synopsis: In Part 1 of this blog post, I took you through the basics of media queries. I also noted that their logic confused me…until I realized that they corresponded to Ruby’s conditional statements! As I mentioned at the end of Part 1, I will use this second part of my blog post to take you through the parts of media queries that confused me the most - “only”, “not”, and “,” (and their complex interactions) - and where a good understanding of Ruby’s conditional statements really came in handy.
Synopsis: When I read through Flatiron’s “Media Queries” lesson, I had some trouble understanding the syntax of a media query. More specifically, I wondered how the logic of it works. Media queries are clearly conditional statements in CSS, but which ones are true, and which ones are false? How do operators like “and”, “not” and “only” work? I had been working on Ruby in this course for a while, so I was used to seeing conditional statements in the form of “if”, “else”, “unless”, etc. But when I got to the Media Queries lesson, I saw this:
Introduction: When I started Flatiron’s Bootcamp Prep, I found out that I would be learning Fullstack web development, which combines Front-End and Back-End web development. With Front-End, you learn languages like HTML and Javascript; with Back-End, you learn Ruby, SQL, and other languages. But one question has been nagging me in the back of my mind for quite some time: How exactly do Front-End and Back-End web development work together? The answer, as it turns out, is in the interaction between the client and the server, and in the request/response cycle. This is the very HEART of Fullstack web development!
Note to Readers: While I will be covering SOME concepts from SQL and SQLite, I will not be covering ALL of them; I would not recommend reading further unless you have a basic understanding of SQL commands. After I give an introduction to SQL and databases and how they can be used in web applications, I will go more in depth about an issue that I struggled with: the difference between GROUP BY and ORDER BY. (I could go into syntax issues that I encountered with other commands, but I would probably need to separate that into at least three blog posts! Let’s save that for another time, shall we?)
Let me be the first to tell you: I tend to overcomplicate things. A. Lot. So, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that I wound up scraping an entire Periodic Table! Believe it or not, even THIS idea was scaled down from a bigger one. Initially, I had wanted to scrape and recreate a whole BIBLE! But after exploring a few websites, I finally realized that trying to scrape thousands and thousands of verses from 66 books probably wasn’t a good idea for my first student project. I may as well have been trying to summit Mt. Everest without ever having climbed up to the top of a 500-foot hill!