In the beginning...

Overview & History:

Hello, Listner (read, likely me). This blog was created and will be maintained with the purpose of documenting my personal travels of learning OOP languages. But let me step back just a moment.

It all started back in the late 90's in the days of dialup, Netscape Navigator, and an endless sea of AOL demo diskettes slash CDs. Computers were sort of funny I remember. The hardware was slow but never obsolete, the displays were 40 lbs. of visible pixels and burned-in DOOM HUDs, if you were lucky a TURBO button adorned your tower, and there was much speculation about RAM doubling software and its effectiveness. The world wide web was also a funny place. The general public didn't really understand, it was a bit of a boogey monster to say the least. It was a good age for a young man to start experimenting. I browsed some less than popular, even nefarious bulletin boards, hung out on EFNet in my spare-spare time, and my curiosity started to take over. I needed to learn what it all meant! I found a few websites of interest that I liked, not much more than your standard Geocities or Angelfire pages. Animated glitter backgrounds, <center> tags, blinking text, marquees, Times New Roman, and more. I wanted in on that. So I learned, all the bad habits and ugly design ideas. View -> Source was a good friend of mine.

Perhaps by accident I did eventually pick up basic HTML. I slowly learned how to use tables and iframes, dabbled heavily in graphic design slash (shudder) image maps, and 'trend-whored' my way through popular design styles.

Hosting was easy to find, through design favors I had gotten some amazing connections.

I begged for, borrowed, and stole images to modify, built the layouts in Notepad (I still prefer text editors to WYSWIG designers), and eventually started feeling semi-accomplished but never satisfied. When Macromedia Flash and Shockwave started gaining popularity, I thought I had piqued. I just wasn't able to grasp the concepts of building interactive bang-boom-pow-hit-you-in-the-face pages. This was the future. And I started feeling like I didn't know what an @ symbol was.

So I moved on to other languages. I went back to EFNet and started finding mIRC scripting to be enjoyable. I could write one hell of a single tiered if-then-else statement, let me tell you. I would run my head into the wall every now and again, trying to learn the basics of Flash- it never happened. In the long run I count that as a blessing. Mobile devices, Web Standards, HTML 5, security flaws, and spats with Apple have crippled Flash. Social media and cat videos have brought the internet to most. Mobile development is the new wave! I'm older and wiser now. And so with that, I am prepared to again start running my head into the wall..

Concepts:

Simply put, the overarching idea with this blog is to learn, study, write, review, and commit to memory the syntax and fundamentals of object oriented programming.

As I have found throughout the years, my motivating factor is a healthy mix of personal enjoyment, a good challenge, and those sweet, sweet "ah-ha" moments.  I have also found I can overwhelm myself, burn out, and lose interest if I'm not careful. And the last of this is the personal learning factor. There is a duality at work here, in that I know that in the near future I will hit a point in which I feel as though I need a bigger challenge, but I am unable to accommodate this desire by myself.

Expectations:

I intend to achieve my goals by several means:
-Focused learning and reading, starting with guided online tutorials and physical books. I will need to seek other sources as I move forward.
-Journaling my personal learning successes and pitfalls here. This includes noting what I am currently learning, working on, other resources, mantras, and concepts.
-Remaining active and reviewing this blog will be required to keep interest and retain information and concepts.
-Peace in knowing I will be losing sleep and hair from here on out.

Where to begin:

With this post of course. After that (so, now), I'll be making my way back to my "For Dummies" books for research and CodeCademy for practical application. My current goals are this: syntax learning via repetition, and concept learning via reading, the current language is JavaScript.