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Take Part in or Host an Hour of Code This Week!

Hour of Code logo

This week, December 8-14, 2014 is Computer Science Education Week! Since its inception in 2013, the Hour of Code movement has been gaining steam. During just the CSE Week last year, 15 million students took part.

There have never been more free resources for learning the basics of programming. Code.org, the founders of the Hour of Code, has lots of ways that someone can take part in, or even host an Hour of Code this week.

One resource that I don’t see mentioned on any of these pages, though it is quite good for a free resource, is Codecademy. JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and PHP are just some of the skills that you can begin learning about there.

If you’ve never programmed before, but you’ve wanted to learn, there’s no time like the present to get started!

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Code School will be Having a Black Friday Special!

CodeSchool logo

I have found Code School to be a great resource both for those just learning to code as well as those who are experienced coders, but want to learn a new programming language. It has multiple paths: Ruby (including Ruby on Rails), JavaScript (includes jQuery and CoffeeScript), HTML/CSS, iOS, Git, and an Electives path for miscellaneous technologies such as R and Chrome DevTools.

The normal price for a subscription at Code School is $29 per month, or $290 per year. However, it appears that they intend to run a Black Friday special for yearly subscriptions. The price will be revealed this Friday. If you don’t already have a subscription, or your subscription is about to run out, this could be a good time to sign up!

Unfortunately, Code School is still lacking Python, though you can learn it at Codecademy (which is free).

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Creating Compressed Files for Each Folder

zip file logo

I had quite a few folders that I wished to compress into ZIP files, all of which happened to exist in a single folder. In Windows, you can certainly compress multiple folders by selecting them all and then right-clicking and selecting “Send To” –> “Compressed (zipped) Folder”. However, this will put all folders into a single zipped file. What if I wanted each folder to have its own zipped file?

Using 7-Zip, I was easily able to do this.

Once 7-Zip is installed, open a Command Prompt and change to the folder in which all your to-be-compressed subfolders reside. The command below will create ZIP files, also in the main folder, from all those subfolders. The assumption here is that 7-Zip is installed in “C:\Program Files\7-Zip”; if it is elsewhere, change this attribute accordingly.

FOR /F "usebackq delims=?" %i IN (`DIR /B /A:D`) DO "C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a "%i.zip" "%i"

For some other options you can use, this post was of great help.