Installing Scratch on OpenSUSE

Introduction

Scratch is a developer application with the young in mind it is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas and concepts, learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

Inroduction

First of all I cannot take credit for anything posted in this article - I got the details required from here Elinux.org. Here you will find full and detailed procedures for many of today's Operating Systems. All I have done is extract the portion that applies to Ubuntu, Debian and it's many derivatives.

About the examples

Varous Javascript pages include a spy glass icon around code examples. Clicking on this will display a new window, So you are not confused by all the stuff normally associated with a Drupal page. You can then run/modify and experiment with the basic example, and when finished save the example page locally, as part of your Javascript kit.

To start to build your own personal javascript kit, open the template page as save it in a folder called (say) JavascriptKit to your local machine.

Algorithms and pseudo code

A computing program is a series of actions that are carried out in a specific order. A procedure for solving a problem is called an algorithm. (named after a 9th century Persian mathematician). Hence any procedural language program is also an algorithm. It consists of

Reserved words in Javascript

The reserved words in this list have special meaning within Javascript so cannot be used as JavaScript variables, functions, methods, or object names. Some of these reserved words are currently used in JavaScript; others are reserved for future use.

Naming a variable var is probably the most common mistake. If you really are stuck for a meaningful variable name, call it myVar.

JavaScript coding guidelines

By establishing a few coding guidelines your code can becomes more readable and easier to edit. The following should be considered as guidelines, rather than standards. The guidelines an be broken down as follows.

Javascript - the language structure

ECMAScript, or as its more popularly known, Javascript, is the scripting language standardized by Ecma International specification ECMA-262 and ISO/IEC 16262. The language is widely used for client-side scripting on the web. Javascript consists of of a set of commands and their syntax. Similar to the rules of grammar, the syntax is simply the way the commands are written so the machine compiler (or interpreter can understand what you have written).

Introduction to Javascript

Javascript was rolled out in December 1995 and was originally developed by Netscape to extend the capabilities of HTML and provide an alternative to CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts. JavaScript quickly became the de facto standard for client-side scripting of web pages. As a consequence, Microsoft reverse-engineered Javascript and came up with their own version called JScript (for legal reasons). This was was released with Internet Explorer 3.0, in August 1996.

The HTML - Javascript interface

As with any programming language, or natural language for that matter, the best and perhaps the only way to learn it, is to dive in and practice. Work through examples, or create you own simple examples to understand what the proram statements mean. Before undertaking these examples, it is assumed you have at least a working knowledge of HTML and preferably Cascading Style sheets (CSS). I.e. you can produce a web page using nothing more complicated than a text editor (notepad or gedit for example).

Security

While Linux is more secure than MS Windows it doesn't mean security issues can be ignored. Whenever you connect to the Internet, you may be at risk. This is perhaps especially true if you are running a server.