Introduction
So, you want to learn how to code? Great! This tutorial aims to help you get the basics down. It’s divided up into a bunch of chapters which teaches different core concepts of programming.
Within these chapters, besides a bunch of text, you will find small snippets of code. It’s recommended that the reader not just read these, but actually copy them and run them interactively using the CoffeeScript REPL. This hands-on approach will allow the reader to get familiar with writing code. Eventually, the snippets will get more complex and you will want to move on to writing the code in separate files.
A text editor that works great for this is Atom, which incidentally is written in CoffeeScript itself. If Atom isn’t your cup of coffee (okay, no more bad puns), you can take a look at the excellent Sublime Text editor. Or you can just use your own favorite text editor, if you already have one.
At the end of each chapter, there will sometimes be a few exercises for the reader to solve. Usually, these are also solved by using the REPL, or writing a small script, but in some cases they will require the reader to modify an existing application. These applications are constructed as examples of how several of the concepts taught in this tutorial can be used in concert to solve a particular problem, or just create a fun app.
Since these applications are often run in the browser, they cannot be started like the rest of the snippets and scripts in this tutorial. To aid with this, each application has been equipped with a fully automated build environment using gulp. This means that all you need to do is run the gulp command and let gulp do all the hard work for you.
Before embarking on your adventure, you will want to follow the installation instructions found on GitHub in order to grab everything that you need for the journey. Having done that, you should be all set and ready to begin!