Getting ready for SAP Design Studio with Codecademy

Word got out that SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio (formerly named as ZEN) will be generally available next month! This week (9 October 2012) SAP is doing a Design Studio 1.0 Product roadmap webinar to explain this early GA and show us the future milestones of this product. If you’re unfamiliar with the whole Design Studio thingy check back at my June post on this subject.

As you can read in that earlier post I needed some JavaScript coding to create a basic interactive filter. Of course this opens up tons of options for developers; just like the possibilities ABAP gives us within SAP BI besides the standard out-of-the-box objects. But, I’m still worried about what this means for the entry level of Design Studio for new developers. Especially if they are used to SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, which is all about drag and drop and where the only ‘coding’ is done in the Excel spreadsheet.

So it might be a good idea to pick up some basic JavaScript and CSS skills beforehand, to have at least some idea what’s going on in Design Studio scripting. I found this great site called Codecademy which offers free courses in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python and Ruby.

A Codecademy course starts of at the very beginning, without prior coding knowledge needed. You will learn a small bit, perform a short exercise in a coding console and the go on to the next bit. At the end of a section you have to combine all the bits in a small project. Forums are directly linked to the exercises so you can easily look for help if you got stuck on a specific exercise. This format also allows you to learn at your own speed and quickly do a few exercises if you have some spare minutes.

So start learning to code at Codecademy.com and see if you can get more badges than I got!