a/A Practice Problem: Third Greatest pt.1

This is the first part of this question/answer series because the answer I came up with was very easy only because I was able to use methods to help me solve it quicker than I think they (a/A) wants. They didn't explicitly say it in this problem, but in previous challenges it said to refrain from using methods like .reverse, which I used here. SO because of that I'm going to show you my short code and talk about .sort, and then another day I'll post a longer more confusing answer that shows your know how to harness the power of loops and variables with the wrath of Aphrodites. Or something. Idfk.

The problem:
# Write a method that takes an array of numbers in. Your method should
# return the third greatest number in the array. You may assume that
# the array has at least three numbers in it.

My Solution:

SO. Let's talk about .sort! Here's my wacky explanation, but please avail yourself to some of the links at the end of this post.

.sort is an array method. It'll work beautifully on arrays containing words and will alphabetize it the way you would. However, it will not do that with numbers. the computer would consider 100 before 2 because 1 is less than 2. So when it comes to numbers, we use this comparison function that you see in there.   return a-b; will sort your numbers from least to greatest, while return b-a will sort your numbers from greatest to least. To avoid saying the wrong thing and causing someone out there (even if it's me at a later date) a massive headache because what I said was gobbledegook, this is as far as I'll go.

Next we want to reverse the array, because when we do that we can easily pull out the third number which by then should be the third greatest!

Make sure to check out these links:
http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_sort.asp
http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/arraysort.shtml


How would you solve this?!

a/A Practice Problem: Is Power of 2?

Truth be told: I definitely looked for help on this problem. And that's OK!! (At least I think it is.) Part of the whole teaching yourself how to code (or anything really!) is learning from others. That means looking at solutions and understanding how that person got there. Not copy-and-pasting their code into the answer box and saying "DONE!", but writing it out yourself, a hundred times if you have to. I looked at a/A's answer to this (in Ruby) and was able to translate it into a working JS program.

Here's the problem:

# Write a method that takes in a number and returns true if it is a
# power of 2. Otherwise, return false.
#
# You may want to use the `%` modulo operation. `5 % 2` returns the
# remainder when dividing 5 by 2; therefore, `5 % 2 == 1`. In the case
# of `6 % 2`, since 2 evenly divides 6 with no remainder, `6 % 2 == 0`.

My Solution

That first if statement, tells us what to reject right away -- if the number passed in isn't divisible by 2, then we know that two things: that it's definitely an odd number, and that it cannot be a power of 2.

The while loop portion was something I picked up from Codewars. Let me try to dissect and explain: The (!num) portion only, excluding the first exclamation mark, is basically saying num is false. The exclamation mark acts like negation (I think-- please feel free to correct me!). So the outer exclamation mark (!(!num)) is a double negative and is basically saying while num is true.

A while loop still needs the same components as a for-loop: the initiation (num), the condition(while num is true) and termination (num is false).

• The first if within the loop would break us out of the loop if and when num is equal to 1 (which would be our 2 to the 0 power case. If we get to this case, that means it is a power of 2 and we should return true, which the code states!
• The else if scenario checks if the remainder of num / 2 is equal to 0. If it is, divide it by 2 again.
• The last else case will handle the other cases and if the number hasn't passed the first two cases, it's not a power of two, so we should return false.

What do you think? How would you solve this problem?!

a/A Practice Problems: Two Sum

It's been a minute. A New York minute, if you will. Cheeeese.  Today we're back with another App Academy practice problem.  Here it is:

# Write a method that takes an array of numbers. If a pair of numbers
# in the array sums to zero, return the positions of those two numbers.
# If no pair of numbers sums to zero, return `nil`.

A couple things beforehand: nil in javascript would be null, so I return null. I came to a working answer through trial and error, but I'm pretty sure there is a much better way to solve this. I tried a couple other ways, but nothing worked so any advice out there would be more than welcome!!

I started the first loop off at 0 and the second loop at 1 because there's no need to add the first index to itself.  Just remember the way nested loops work : the second loop will finish an entire iteration (from 1 to less than nums.length before the first loop moves on to i = 1.

That last line there was my test case, so don't mind that! :) Usually when I solve problems, I write everything out. I'm working on being more concise with my code, which is why I didn't declare an array and then push the values to it (even though I definitely tried this a billion times). But I gotta say, I kinda liked just returning i and j in an array.

That's all for today.
Happy coding! :)

More Free Resources

I recently got a hold of some questions asked by the schools I want to attend during their preliminary coding challenges. Let's just say some were very, very hard.

I did one set of problems for one school and felt great! I was able to answer all three with very little effort and time, which of course was a huge relief. However, on the other exam I was able to fully answer ONE out of FIVE. I was almost done with the second and was able to write some pseudo code for the third, but by the end of my time I barely understood what the last two were asking from me. It was a huge blow.

Since then I've been researching, practicing, learning everything. From refreshing on my basics from 'A Smarter Way to Learn Javascript', to exploring completely new topics that have helped me solve the problems that once bamboozled me.

All in all, things have been progressing over on my end and I hope they are on yours as well! Today I just have a couple more links I've found while trying to learn on my own.

funfunfunctions: This guy is a little goofy and he codes using ECMA6 which at times is a little confusing since I'm still learning vanilla javascript, but he explains things pretty well and hates fibonacci sequences more than I do (which I didn't think was possible). He has some great videos covering more "basics" of javascript that really help push your code to the next level.

Codesmith.io: Codesmith is a dev bootcamp based out of LA. I discovered them while doing some research on course report and found that they offer **FREE** workshops titled 'JS: The Hard Parts'.
It's an in-person workshop you can sign into and participate in via youtube. You can even pair-program with a virtual partner (for which I am currently taking applications). The workshops are held weekly on Thursday nights and really tackled some of the tough stuff these coding schools would like their applicants to be aware of.

That's all for now! Stay tuned for the debut of an awesome website the boy and I are working on :)

Codewars as a Training Tool

In this post I wanted to stick up for CodeWars and help explain to the novice coder why this site is so fucking awesome.

First, a little backstory. My boyfriend and I are both just starting out in this whole programming world. He was the one who told me about it first and when I first went to the site, I could barely get past the mandatory (but simple) coding challenges you have to get right in order to gain access to the full site.

Fast forward to today and I am on the site at least once a day training. It has become the best learning tool for me thus far. It challenges me every day, reminding me why I like coding. My boyfriend on the other, while he can build out an entire rails app, absolutely hates the site. I think it's because he hasn't given it enough of a chance (which is true), but he says his learning style is different (which also is true). Either way, I happen to think that anyone who uses the system the right way will soon too become a true believer. So, herein this post I present to you my methodology to using the site so that even you can conquer and earn your honor.

1. Select your level.
On the left hand side you will find everything you need to make sure you are doing problems within your range. The levels are from easiest, 8, to hardest, 1. Truth be told, it's best to have gone through the basics so that you can attempt the problems, but even if you are going along as you learn you can customize which problems to do (see below). Start off with 8, and move at your own pace. Some of the problems within are going to be a lot more difficult than some of the others. But give yourself some patience and work through them, absorbing everything you can.

2. Select what areas you want to train.
Once you've selected which level you want to compete in, you can then choose problems that have been tagged with certain areas of concentration. On the left hand side, under Tags, you can select Arrays, Numbers, Bugs, Fundamentals, etc. When I was starting out I found that the best thing that helped me was completing level 8 "bug" problems. They re-familiarized me with syntax and some other basic concepts that helped me to solve some other problems without the worry of that. If you're working through the problems while trying to master one area of a certain language, this will be one of the best ways to use CodeWars to do just that.

3. Don't be ashamed to forfeit honor.
No one likes to lose, obviously. But sometimes, you need to suck it up. There are problems that for some reason will not pass the tests, but once you click submit will actually work. Save for these cases, if you can't figure out why something won't work, it might be time to just unlock the solutions to that problem. It could be something simple you overlooked, but if it's something you can't figure out on your own, unlock the solutions and see how other people solved it. Think of it as learning, not cheating if you happen to be so honorable.

4. Read other peoples' answers.
Whether I submitted my answer or forfeited honor, I always look at other peoples' answers. There will be things in there that look like straight up gibberish. Even when I finished my Javascript book, there were things I had never seen before. Methods that would produce the right code with a fraction of the lines. It was insane. But it's also insanely insightful. Whenever there's something I don't understand I look it up, and you can get the general idea of the way something works once you see it.

Going through the site without any sort of order can be pretty depressing as a noob. You can easily get that "omg-I'm-never-going-to-understand-this-and-I-better-get-back-to-my-dead-end-job" feeling, but I swear with time, patience and a little order CodeWars can and will open all sorts of doors.

a/A Practice Problems: Nearby AZ

Practice Problem 8 of 21 and the first medium! It's exciting stuff happening 'round these parts. Without further adieu...

Write a method that takes a string in and returns true if the letter "z" appears within three letters **after** an "a". You may assume that the string contains only lowercase letters.

This is a little trickier, but still employs the same methods and logic that we've already seen. A couple loops and if statements.

1.  Declare our function with one parameter, string.

function nearbyAZ (string) {
}

2.  I wanted to declare a variable, index1, that would hold the place of the position in which the letter "a" appears. This will be helpful later when determining if there's a "z" within the next three letters.

function nearbyAZ (string) {

   var index1 = 0;

}

3. We want to loop through all the letters in order to see if there's an "a".  The code block within the loop will be an if/else statement. If there's an "a", store it's index number in the variable, index1, and break out of the loop. Else, I want to increase index1 by one with each iteration of the loop. This way we will store the correct position number.

function nearbyAZ (string) {

   var index1 = 0;

   for (var i = 0; i < string.length; i++) {

      if (string[i] === "a") {
         index1 = i;

         break;

      }

      else {

         index1++;

      }

   }

}

4.  After the previous loop, I want another variable, index2, which will store the value of index1 + 1. This will be where our loop will start, and it should end at the third letter after the first a: index1 + 3. 

function nearbyAZ (string) {

   var index1 = 0;

   for (var i = 0; i < string.length; i++) {

      if (string[i] === "a") {

         break;

      }

      else {

         index1++;

      }

   }

   var index2 = index1 + 1;

   for (var j = index2; j <= index1 + 3; j++) {

   }

}

5. Start the loop at index2 because we are only concerned with the first three letters after the letter "a". Likewise, we'll want to stop the loop once it reaches that third letter. An if statement is the last part required to return true or false if there's a "z". 

function nearbyAZ (string) {

   var index1 = 0;

   for (var i = 0; i < string.length; i++) {

      if (string[i] === "a") {

         break;

      }

      else {

         index1++;

      }

   }

   var index2 = index1 + 1;

   for (var j = index2; j <= index1 + 3; j++) {

      if (string[j] === "z") {

         return true;

      }

   }

   return false;

}

Check out past problems here:

• Reverse a String
• Factorial
• Longest Word
• Sum Num
• Time Conversion 
• Count Vowels 
• Palindrome

a/A Practice Problems: Longest Word

This problem was a tricky one. Despite its "easy" rating, I struggled with it for a little thinking of the most roundabout ways of answering, including multiple nested for loops-- which as you can guess was just a joy ride. Maybe possible, but that way would have taken me forever to write and would have probably been very error prone. The hardest part for me turned out to be knowing how to set it up. How could I solve this so that I didn't need to go through every character of a string? Well, you don't want to go through every character necessarily (my first mistake), but rather every word. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Problem:  Write a method that takes in a string. Return the longest word in the string. You may assume that the string contains only letters and spaces. You may use the 'split' method to aid you in your quest.

Game Plan: 

>>  Function that has one parameter (string) in this example.

>>  How can you quickly separate each word? Split method. The result of which will return an array of all the words. You'll want to set this equal to some variable for easy access later.

>>  For loop to go though each word to determine if it's the longest.

>>  This is where I got sort of lost-- I knew I needed to do all the above steps, but I didn't know how to keep track of which word was longest. If you had one independent variable to compare each word to, wouldn't that be easier than making some sort of March-Madness bracket system where you compare every word to each other? Methinks yes. So in order to do that, I'll set a variable equal to 0. The way the loop will work : compare the first word's length to 0, if the word is bigger (which it will be since it will be at least one letter character), i'll save the length of that word to the variable. As the loop progresses it will compare each word to this variable, saving the larger of the two.

>>  if statement to compare lengths

>>  Return longest word

Step 1:

                                             function longestWord(string) {

                                             }

Step 2:

                                             function longestWord(string) {

                                                var words = string.split(" ");

                                             }

Make sure there's a space between your quotes so that it knows where to split the string. If you didn't include the space, you would get each individual character at each index.

Step 3:

                                             function longestWord(string) {

                                                var words = string.split(" ");

                                                var longest = 0;

                                             }

We declare this variable, so that we don't need to compare each word to each other, but rather one independent variable.

Step 4:

                                            function longestWord(string) {

                                               var words = string.split(" ");

                                               var longest = 0;

                                               for (var i  = 0; i < words.length; i++) {

                                               }

                                            }

Remember when you split the string, it results in an array of all the words so we can use the array's length.

Step 5:

                                             function longestWord(string) {

                                                var words = string.split(" ");

                                                var longest = 0;
                                                var longIndx = 0;

                                                for (var i  = 0; i < words.length; i++) {

                                                   if (words[i].length > longest) {

                                                      longest = words[i].length;

                                                      longIndx++;

                                                   } 

                                                }

                                             }

The tricky part-- if the length of the word at index i is greater than longest (0), then we change the value of longest to the length of that word. AND since we want to keep track of which word we are on, we can set a marker of sorts at 0 (longIndx) that will increase if the word at position i is greater than longest. The value will let us know the index number of the longest word so that we can call it later.

Step 6:

                                             function longestWord(string) {

                                                var words = string.split(" ");

                                                var longest = 0;

                                                var longIndx = 0;

                                                for (var i  = 0; i < words.length; i++) {

                                                   if (words[i].length > longest) {

                                                      longest = words[i].length;

                                                      longIndx++;

                                                   }

                                                 }

                                                 return words[longIndx];

                                              }

Try it yourself!

Check out past problems here:

• Reverse a String
• Factorial
• Sum Num
• Time Conversion 
• Count Vowels 
• Palindrome
• Nearby AZ

My 3 Favorite Free Resources to Learn Javascript

When I started this blog (a whole 4 posts ago), I was focused on learning Ruby. Since then I've switched gears because the school I will be applying to focuses solely on, you guessed it, Javascript. I hope to visit Ruby again in the future, but for now I'm all bout those curly braces. Woo.

I've had some success in learning the language. Thanks to the interwebs and all the free resources I've been using, I feel pretty good about where I'm at so I wanted to share what's helped me.

1.  A Smarter Way to Learn by Mark Myers.
   This book was recommended to me by a friend and has since become the basis of all my understanding. The way Myers explains things is pretty straightforward and everything builds on itself almost perfectly. Every chapter-- only 89 --  lasts a couple of pages, 5 maybe at most and once you're done there are practice problems associated with each chapter to test your newly acquired knowledge. While the book focuses on many different concepts, it does so in pretty basic ways, but this is to ease you into the language and help you to actually understand the fundamentals.
   
   
2. Codewars
   When I first heard of Codewars I was eager to sign up. Be aware, there are two problems you have to answer right to actually become a part of the site, but once you are it's great! It works like Karate in that you start at the beginner levels denoted by higher numbers (8 kata) and work your way down (or up) to 1, at which time you can be a self-proclaimed Jedi coding wizard. You can target what you want to work on: fundamentals, algorithms, logic, loops, etc, in every level and go from there. You earn honor or "kata" for every question you answer right and it's a great way to test or refine your skills. As far as negatives go, it can be really self-defeating. Sometimes the challenges themselves aren't written correctly and so you can't get the points even though your answer is right. Other times it serves as a humble reminder that you might be a long way from where you want to be. But don't get discouraged! If you can't solve a problem and it's eating away at you (a common thing 'round these parts) forfeit the kata and read some solutions (only visible when you forfeit or answer correctly). See what others have posted and you might find that the answer was well within your reach, and you will start getting better. Remember: wax on, wax off.
   
   
3. YouTube
   My biggest struggle with learning to code on my own was a lack of resources out there after the plethora of pure beginner sources. I was having a hard time translating what I had learned into actual working programs. Step in YouTube: the world's best guidebook for any and all things. While I have had some trouble finding a video that explains the exact problem I'm working on, I have found some really helpful tutorials that lead me the right way. The user, kudvenkat, has been one of my personal favorites, but there are seriously endless amounts of people out there willing to help. Another personal fave: LearnCode.academy.

Of course this list is not exhaustive, and as such I have a few others I'd like to shout out: 

Honorable mentions: w3schools, devtools and stackoverflow.

My hope is that this helps someone else out there, but know there are so many other people and resources willing to help if this particular list doesn't work for you. Go and get on with your bad self.

Happy Friday, friends!