You can't go wrong with a Yamaha Pacifica, although you'll pay closer to €250 - the build quality is consistently excellent and the 112J is extremely versatile. Harley Benton (Thomann's house brand) offer a very wide range of guitars at under €200 with shockingly good specifications, but the quality control is a bit more patchy, so I'd suggest getting a guitar-playing friend to look it over or paying a local guitar store for a setup.
If you're just practising at home, the Positive Grid Spark 40 is an astounding bargain at under €250. It sounds great out of the box with a simple interface, but connect the app and you've got near-endless tonal options and tons of really useful practice features. It also does double-duty as a good Bluetooth speaker. Spend a little over €250 on something like the Fender Mustang LT50 or the Boss Katana 50 and you've got a versatile modelling amp that'll just about keep up with a drummer in a rehearsal room.
Seconding Harley Benton and the Positive Grid. I bought an HB-35 B Stock (a return) and a Positive Grid Spark Go (I'm a bedroom player atm). With setup, the whole thing set me back 350 USD.
A Harley Benton or similar guitar paired with a 100 Euro audio interface plugged into a computer that runs Neural Amp Modeler has been the perfect setup for me https://www.neuralampmodeler.com/
My experience is that amp simulators sound pretty close to a valve amp, but they don't feel and react to your playing like one. This may or may not matter to you. That said, you are never going to be able to turn up loud enough to get the sound in an average apartment, and digital works better for me volume
I own some Fenders and Gibsons, but over the last couple of years, Harley Benton produces very good guitars that are very affordable.
I have one of their telecasters, and it’s on par with a squier or a cheap fender, provided that you get it set up properly.
When I got to that cheap telly, I initially had planned to replace the pick ups, but guess what, the stock pick ups are good actually.
For amps, that strongly depends on your personal taste, but usually you go used. For example, if you’re into metal, you can get Peavey ValveKings for low $, they just require a good speaker. There are also several cheap clones available. YouTube has you covered with demos.
Also, digital amps have become good enough, even those software only, for example GarageBand.
You just need some audio interface.
The amp is based on the Monoprice Stage Right 15W which is a clone of the Laney Cub 12R which is losely inspired by the Vox AC15. So you get a decent 15W tube amp with a real spring reverb for 260 Euros. There is not a lot with that amount of bang for the buck out there.
If you're playing in a loud band it might be a little underpowered, but it is perfect for playing at home, and if you want it to be any wilder than it is, just use pedals in front of it.
That's a solid amp for the money, but IMO you get even more bang for your buck if you can snag a used Boss Katana 50. Loud enough to play in a band, hundreds of possible tones, excellent software for recording and customizing tones while plugged into your PC.
Not sure about the amp, but the Yamaha Pacifica I have is decent. It's been used in a stage show successfully (not played by me), and the artist was very happy with it.
It seems this is aimed at young people learning how to program. My main problem with using Javascript as the first programming language to learn is the asynchronous callback paradigm, I believe it's too complicated a concept to teach in the very beginning (and you can't get around that with Javascript).
When I evaluated different languages / environments to start teaching programming to my daughters I decided not to use Javascript because of that, chose Python instead (and now I'm also considering making games with Roblox, which is based on Lua. The dev environment is quite complex but with supervision Lua is a nice & simple programming language)
I had a similar concern, that's why we started with Python initially (see my top-level comment). However, Kaboom's programming model is actually quite simple. It doesn't suffer from any callback hell. You should give it a go.
It's modeled a bit after the block-like paradigm introduced by Scratch, which I guess you can call "async" but seems really intuitive for kids.
JavaScript itself is not async. It's the programs/engines that runs the scripting language that have decided to make it async with callbacks. For example Microsoft JS is not async.
* ES2022? do have some garbage collection hook that uses a callback, so if that makes it into the standard you could say that JS/ES is async. JavaScript itself does not (yet) have any async functions.
Even though there is the async keyword and Promise() there are no async functions nor callbacks in JavaScript itself. For example setInterval and setTimeout is not part of the language and needs to be implemented by the runtime/program that runs the JavaScript.
Yes, but it isn't the core way the language works -- you don't need to approach asynchronicity very early on as you do with JS, and it's not all closures. At some point someone learning Python will have to do something async. But what they can do up until then is just not do anything async, and that's fine (just wait for stuff to complete...). That's not really an option in JS: the great benefit of the language from a learner perspective is that it just runs straightaway in the browser, everywhere. But to actually do anything interesting (click a button, make something happen), that's async.
Re. the syntax, anecdata but I've helped beginners through their initial steps for about 6 years now in JS (and Python) and C-type syntax is just not an issue that slows down learning or causes issues. There are only so many different ways syntax can be structured so it's sane for a compiler to parse, they all work basically the same way, and people get used to a syntax really quickly
Hey there, I've also taught lots of students online!
In my JS courses, I actually don't touch upon async things until I get to rather advanced/intermediate courses.
Universally, I think the fundamentals of programming languages can be taught without too many drawbacks and agnostic of language choice unless the language is super verbose.
For example, all the things with closures, this, and asynchronous programming probably aren't relevant until a student runs into them/their gotchas while making web applications. By that point, I think framing it as event driven programming makes a lot of sense and gives context without being forced to deal with the details.
I think doing anything cool in other languages is also almost similar. A while loop/game loop in Python or other languages is pretty similar to the event loop which where the asynchronous nature of JS comes from. This becomes really apparent when working with games like Roblox/Lua and Minecraft/Minecraft plugins+mods.
Yes, yes, it is similar, and I maybe didn't get that across as well as I could have. JS is the default (for good reasons!), but IME if we're talking about game engines aimed at beginners that are suitable for getting programming concepts across, I feel a [synchronous] game loop is often easier to get across conceptually, to build on. And then yes, definitely framing it in the same way works really well because when they get stuck, you can point them at that and say "well you've already done something really similar here, here's the comparison, {unpack how the async stuff is working by framing it in the same way}, you should be able to now link these concepts together"
(Apologies to other commenters as well! I got a little bit salty when people mentioned async in relation to beginner programmers because it's not a simple thing. It's abstract and doesn't really make a bunch of sense until the beginner has built a floor of very basic programming to stand on)
I’m sure you know about async/await in JavaScript? It sounds like the issue you have is not so much with the traditional paradigm of using callbacks, but the fact that the “default” environment in JavaScript is a GUI rather than a CLI, meaning that you need to figure out things like event handlers pretty early on?
Yes, default environment is the browser, that's a given and that's fine: if you are a beginner, making stuff happen there is easy and rewarding. Everyone has easy access to it
[I apologise for being a little snippy here]. I don't have an issue here: I don't think you & sibling commenters are really getting that these are beginners I'm talking about. Yes, I am aware of async/await. With the browser being the default environment, a beginner has to understand callback-related programming with JS quickly: they need to be able to say "I want to do this then this". You have do this via callbacks. You can write JS synchronously, but IME this isn't practical.
Using async/await isn't some magic bullet here. You can write synchronous-looking asynchronous code, but the level I'm talking about is: what does asynchronous mean? What does synchronous mean? Once they've got that (which is not simple), what's a Promise? That one's fun because you need to explain the concept and how they work first, and generally that's gibberish. Async/await helps, so say I ignore Promises and go straight to that. At which point the learner starts getting errors to do with unresolved values. And back to Promises we go. And so on.
I would say that I don't think there's any magic language that makes things easy for learners, and JS has many advantages over any other one, mainly to do with its general accessibility. But it's a fairly weird language in how it works, it isn't the simplest.
I fully respect that these things are not easy for a complete beginner! I might not have expressed it very clearly but that’s what I tried to say; the browser environment requires you to deal with asynchronicity to do almost anything other than log to the console, so that makes it a tough place to start.
In node, nearly all of the stuff has sync versions and global await is around the corner.
For every other saner environment (read: browser consoles), global await is a thing already, and you get immediate feedback, and have a canvas (with sync APIs!).
That being said, I do think that the best programming language to start learning is the one your parents/friends speak.
When you're teaching beginners: what you're talking about won't really make any sense. It's an implementation detail (and a complex one at that).
A beginner at basic level, that's "what's a variable", "what's a function", "I don't see what the point of a function is". And something like Node -- it's just not a great environment to explain that: it doesn't do much that's interesting, like move stuff around on a screen. You can type stuff into the REPL, and it will spit things back, but that's just going to look like a calculator. Something like Processing, or a simple game engine aimed at beginners, or even making things happen on a web page using JS: that's good, it holds interest.
Its been a while that I did somehing with python - but shouldn't event handlers work pretty much the same? Or in other words, how can eventhandlers work any other way than asynchronous?
The secret of Javascript syntax is that, once you grok how functions are just special objects, it's actually a Lisp with a bunch of weird cruft attached to it.
redwoodjs aims to provide a framework for a serverless architecture with jamstack - It looks amazing.
Amplication aims to provide an easier and continuous development experience with Node.js, to allow node.JS developers to focus on their business domain instead of design and boilerplate.
Amplication generates a human-readable source code to allow the developers the freedom to choose how to use their apps and how to deploy it - Whether because of business policies and architecture, privacy and security concerns, or just personal preferences.
“Euler’s identity” is a flashy way of stating that a half-turn rotation in the plane is equivalent to a reflection across the center of rotation. This is a fact which can be easily understood by young children.
The part that makes the expression flashy is that the rotation is written via its logarithm, which can be represented as the length of a circular arc (“angle measure”).
It’s a useful fact to know, but is vastly overrated.
I don't know why this comment got downvoted. I personally thing there is so much truth in it.
I practice Olympic lifting (total beginner) and I have to concentrate so much during exercises. Take for instance the snatch movement [1] which is my personal favorite and one of the hardest (in my opinion)
Also I find weightlifting very addictive: when you do the movement successfully is very rewarding. When you get it wrong you can't wait to try again next time
Okay, but how much you find it addictive, and how much you feel you need to concentrate doesn't mean it'll improve brain plasticity in elderly people. In this study, they did a form of strength training and it didn't improve brain plasticity nearly as dance.
So I mean, it's hard to have someone just come in and say: "nope the data is wrong my opinion of this activity I am biased towards as I practice it myself is right", and not be somewhat skeptical. Yes, this is a small preliminary study, maybe the type of strength training was responsible for the failings, etc. But it's still much more substantial then someone's opinion.
Best resource I've found to learn the foundation of HTML/CSS is Shay Howe's guides [1]. I think it doesn't cover Flexbox and more advanced layouts, but it's totally worth a read. I still go back to it as reference from time to time.
Yes. I moved. I wanted to. There is no substitute to meeting your friends at elevenses (tea at 11 in the morning), pubs etc. Getting the degree is just 10% of the fun.
It was ordered by the "Juzgado Central de Instrucción número 6" of the "Audiencia Nacional" which is presided by Manuel Maria Garcia-Castellon. The police cannot request taking-down a website without a judicial order.
Ok, so he's the same one who ordered detentions on 9 Catalan independence supporters under the accusations that they were preparing terrorist actions, even though there is no evidence on that?
It seems like he sees terrorism everywhere when he looks at Catalans.
Hi Eric, are you using the Lean Startup methodology to develop this? It seems to me you're trying to solve a very big problem directly, and there is less room for iteration... Would you say that when the LTSE opens in 2018 it is an MVP and iteration will start?
