What I'm Learning

I put my new JavaScript knowledge to use to display our impessive collection of READ posters yesterday. I can say "impressive" because I had nothing to do with the creation of the posters other than standing in the Harry Potter one. I already knew how to do slide shows, but did learn quite a bit from the Learn JavaScript book our library has an e-copy of.

I'm also slowly working my way through Beginning Flash Game Programming for Dummies. I'm not all that bad with basic flash (see my tutorials), but have been really limited as to how much interactivity is involved. The previous books I used that discussed the programming aspects were way over my head.

I am so excited to see that after working through a basic JavaScript book, the ActionScript in Flash is almost identical... except easier! The main difference that makes it more difficult, though, is that the code is put into a particular frame of a Flash document, so it doesn't apply to the rest of the document. That means if you want something in on eplace to affect something somewhere else, then you have to add additional code to tell it that. Once I wrap my brain around how that works, I'm sure I'll get pretty good at it. I can already have it generate random numbers between 1-6 to simulate rolling a die, a person can enter their name and get a message saying "Hello, !" (with whatever name they entered), and a math game that keeps score. I understand almost all of the code, though I haven't tried to apply it to new situations yet.

I presented my CiL 2008 to the staff this morning. I had to stop myself a few times to explain what a widget was, what RSS was, what Web 2.0 meant... I'm sure I forgot to explain a few things, and I regret not being able to get other people as excited as I am about what I learned, or how cool it was to see the librarian blog celebrities.