Two Hundred Episodes!

th, 2014 | Comments | Permalink May 5, 2014

I’m thrilled to announce that this Wednesday marks the 200th Live episode of Let’s Code: Test-Driven JavaScript!

Free Videos for Everyone!

To celebrate the 200th episode, I’m throwing open the gates! All day Wednesday, from midnight to midnight eastern time, all videos will be free for everyone! No subscription or login necessary. Edit: It’s over, but you can still get the videos by subscribing!

We’ve covered a ton of ground since launching back in 2012. Here’s a few of our best chapters. Dive in!

Part I: Node.js

We start the series by test-driving a Node.js server and releasing a simple marketing home page. Part I is the beginning of our quest for high-quality, maintainable, refactorable code.

Chapter 1: Continuous Integration. We start out right with an automated build and continuous integration... and a lot of shameless cheating. Despite using the world’s cheapest continuous integration server, we do something very few teams can do: we guarantee that the integration build never breaks. Never!

Chapter 3: A Simple Node.js Server. Did someone tell you test-driven development is about unit testing? Bullpucky! TDD is about using tests to understand your code. In this case, we use integration tests to understand how a Node.js server works. We also demonstrate the Let’s Code JavaScript philosophy: mistakes, setbacks, and triumphs. They’re all there for you to see and learn from.

Part II: Front-End, Cross-Browser

With a simple marketing page under our belt, we turn to test-driving our front-end code. Not just on one easy browser, like Chrome. No... on all the browsers we care about, including that right bastard, IE 8.

Part III: Productization

What’s the difference between a weekend hack and a real production app? Sweating the details. In Part III, we sweat a lot of ’em.

Chapter 21: Cross-Browser Incompatibility. IE 8 sucks. Oh yes it does. And we gotta support it. Why? Because when you’re building a production-grade app, you don’t get to skip the hard parts.

Chapter 28: Like Magic. It takes a while for TDD to pay off. Usually several weeks of hard work. So skip ahead to the end of the book. In this chapter, all our libraries are in place, our code is refactored, the test strategy confirmed... and everything Just Works.

And Much, Much More...

That’s just the “Recorded Live” channel. We have two more channels that are completely different! Here are a few of my favorite episodes:

Front-End Unit Testing in a Nutshell. The “Lessons Learned” channel distills a topic down to its essence. We use images, animation, and code to concisely illustrate theory.

CasperJS. In “The Lab”, we explore and experiment. This episode is about understanding CasperJS, a tool for making headless browser testing more convenient.

What’s Next?

Next week, we start Part IV! In this part, we’ll take our MVP and update it for the consumer web. Design and test-driven CSS are on the menu. Responsive design, too. In our monthly specials, we’ll be looking at front-end frameworks and much more. Join us!