My goal in these early months of 2016 is to learn Angular JS, the reason for which will be unveiled in the upcoming months. For now, as a starting point, I just finished an outstanding Udemy course —Learn and Understand AngularJS — created by Anthony P. Alicea. He is exceptionally clear and organized as an instructor, and the context and asides he incorporated throughout the course helped me not only begin the journey into Angular, but also with Javascript, HTML and CSS.
The product of this course is a single page application, Quick Weather Checker, for a peek at elements of the weather forecast in cities around the world for your choice of two, five or seven days. The data for the page is from Open Weather Map.
This little app will be expanded and enhanced in the upcoming days both from a content and design standpoint.
February 16, 2016 — starting to learn Cloud9 IDE, as well as a bit more Bootstrap CSS and Angular JS — check out today’s Quick Weather Checker (link above).
February 24, 2016 — I finished the section of the Angular JS: Zero to Hero course on form validation — excellent! So, I updated the Quick Weather Checker to incorporate validation on the text input field, via the Angular Auto_Validate module recommended by the instructor. I also explored the world of regex code to require the user to input strings in a particular format. Regex 101 was quite helpful in trying out the various code sequences I found online. Click on the Quick Weather Checker link above.
Next up . . . . The Open Weather Map data has a unique id for each city and then also for the country, but no entry for US states for some odd reason! Even on their website, when one searches by city name, the choices one gets are arranged by latitude/longitude which is not very user friendly. Since many US city names are redundant across states, searching only on a city name won’t necessarily get a weather forecast for the city in the state you need. I found another database that uses the same id, but also includes state name. So, I want to initially search in that second json file, find the object that has both the city and state names that were input by the user, grab the id from that object, then go access the weather data from openweathermap json data with that id. Slowly, I am learning how to write pieces of code to perform different parts of the puzzle, but not yet to the point of integrating that into angular in a functional way. But, I think I will get there. After I finish the Zero to Hero course on Udemy 🙂