My intent here is to teach the basics of programming by creating something interesting.
Here you will learn to write an algorithm that compresses data!
Compression algorithms are all around us, from spotify to netflix and everything in between.
It's what makes all the fun stuff we enjoy possible!
But first, you will need data to compress, so you will create an algorithm that creates data!
Next we will create an algorithm that calculates the percentage of compression we achieved with our compression algo!
Finally we will display:
The data we created.
The data in compressed format.
The percentage of compression we achieved.
In doing all of this you will learn the basic building blocks and patterns of programming.
Want to jump right in ?
Open this file to see the tutorial runLengthEncoding.js
In another window open a coding environment (It's free to sign up) and get started! REPL Coding environment
Want to see JUST the code? Open justTheCode.js
This tutorial is written in Javascript.
If you have comments or suggestions please leave them here.
If you would like to contribute, even better!
Thanks and have fun!
-Emmanuel