This is Proscrypt Koans, a web development tutorial intended for an audience new to developing. The author has always been better at teaching than doing, nevertheless his vanity induces him to suggest it may also demonstrate techniques, tools, and workflows of interest to salty coding veterans.
Perhaps you're a project manager who wants to understand when the linux neck-beards she works with are shining her on with gobbledy-gook or made up jargon. Maybe you're a Marine standing watch at an embassy or a sailor on a nuclear submarine, looking to idle away some time. A bartender with too much college debt. One of those emo kids who hates football and wears axe body spray and vapes and fantasizes about the cheerleaders who get all excited when the cheerleaders look at them, if only momentarily, until he realizes she's merely impressed at the size and color of the inflamed pimple on his nose. A beauty-queen trophy-wife who has always been quiet and perfect, and who nobody thought was smart, but who just yesterday overheard some fat ugly slut throwing shade on her Masters in Art History, and now she's going to show everyone what is the mothafucking what. Your motivation doesn't matter to me because it won't matter to your code. Your code either a) will work or b) won't. Your code doesn't care how old you are, where you live, what car you drive, how smart you are or what your SAT score was.
What you do need to get started are a computer running Windows, OSX, or Ubuntu, an Internet connection, a few hour-long blocks of uninterrupted time, a good attitude, some unhealthy curiosity, some obsessiveness, some stubbornness, some anger, the abilities to focus and pay attention to detail, and the humility to ask the salts for help when you're stuck. Because this tutorial and these koans are hard; computers and software and other developers make the author feel stupid every day. I wish I knew how to help you find out if you like developing without making you feel stupid. I don't. But if you finish these koans, nobody will be happier for you than me.
Not even your Mom.
The author has two goals. The first is for you to learn a bit about developing. The second is for you to find out if you like developing. If you like developing it won't matter how much you suck at it. Like a carpenter who gets splinters and blisters at first but then builds callouses, soon you'll start to forget that you suck, you'll keep at it, and you'll realize that's what developing is about: Developing things and sucking at it and then sucking less, and then being able to point to something cool you built, or some problem you solved, or someone's life you made easier, and say "I did that."
What's a koan? Here's one definition that seems legit:
A paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment
I'm no Zen Buddhist monk and hope you'll never abandon reason; but I have always had trouble learning from lectures and big, fat, door-stopper textbooks. The times I've learned quickest are after jumping in: You may not know what the German word for toilet is, but if you're visiting Munich during Oktoberfest, you'll figure it out soon. So I'm going to give you a koan to reflect on, or solve, or whatever you want to call what you do after reading it. You're going to figure out how to solve the koan, and once you've solved it, you're going to move to the next koan, and the next, and the next, until you're done or have decided they are not for you.
I'm not going to teach you anything, you're going to teach yourself.
The site you're reading these koans on is an amazing one now owned by Microsoft that's all about managing different versions, or branches, of a code base, or just any group of files known in this tutorial as a repository. These koans are organized into different chapters, corresponding to different versions of the code in our repo. Click around to get a feel for the site. When you've figured out how to change the "branch" of this repo to "chapter-1," please go ahead and do so.