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...All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain....

- soliloquy from Blade Runner


Bits and bytes do get lost, awash in the rain of data flow that is Internet. They slip away from us, never to found again... some of them will be captured here, many more will not... like tears in rain...



Monday, December 3, 2012

70-480 - DONE!

 70-480  is Microsoft exam for HTML5 - Programming in HTML5 using Jaascript and CSS3. I took it last week and while I can't divulge the details, here are some important points:
- I've learned a lot about supoort for HTML5 and turned out that lots of things are already supported (like Geolocation, User Storage etc) and things that are not supported in older browser directly, can still be implemented thanks to Modernizr. That was very pleasant surprise.
- There is a lot of useful stuff in new spec, and while some things are really specific like Video/Audio, some things are universally useful - web workers, web sockets, offline access, local/Session Storage.
 In short, HTML5 is way more useful than I thought what is good, and browsers are implementing more and more of it with every version.

- Exam was both harder and easier than I expected.

 Harder because I did have to learn lots of CSS that I really didn't bother to before, on top of the new stuff  - google is my friend when it comes to figuring out is underline text decoration or text transformation property!
 Also, I was surprised by some  IE 10 specific stuff. I really didn't expect to see -ms- tag specific CSS questions or IE10 specific questions, and I got 3 of those.

 Easier than I expected in JavaScript area - I did lots of study on callbacks, closures and prototypes, and while I've got question on all those, I got several jQuery and plain JavaScript questions that I didn't have to sweat at all. Having 12 years of experience there helped a lot ;)
Also, I've got way more question than I expected I on accessing and validating DOM Elements - at least 25% was all about DOM, Regex, JS validation, HTML5 validation...
 That's the area I've scored worst too, so I am sure that I've missread some of the questions rather than answer them incorrectly.

 Here are the links I've used to study, since those 2 blogs very detailed and useful.



 

Only thing that I didn't like was links to w3school site - that site is ok for a quick reference, but it's very sparse and if you are looking for any kind of explanation, there is nothing. It's ok to see that function takes 3 parameters, but please add couple of examples so that people can understand the purpose of that function! I still remember, fondly, Turbo Pascal documentation, one of the best ever. Every function had all parameters spelled out, regarding their types and purpose, return value has always defined type, and each function has several examples to better explain the nuances in calling. Seriously good great documentation.

 All in all, good exam to have under your belt if you want to use new standard in web development or to start with developing Win8 applications.