Learn to Code the Tina4 Way#

Make It Work. Make It Right. Make It Last.

How This Course Works - The Syllabus - Module 1

This is not a framework tutorial#

You will not learn a framework here. You will learn to build software, and Tina4 is the workbench you learn it on.

Tina4 makes a good workbench because it has opinions. Every opinion is a decision somebody made, and a decision you can be taught to interrogate. When you finish a module you will know what Tina4 does, what Django and Rails and Laravel do instead, and which situations make each one wrong.

That transfer is the point. Walk out of here and you can read a Rails codebase.

Three levels#

Level 1: Make It Work - modules 1 to 12. You have never written a line of code. You finish able to build a small web application and explain every line of it.

Level 2: Make It Right - modules 13 to 24. You can write code that runs. You finish able to write code another person can maintain without phoning you.

Level 3: Make It Last - modules 25 to 36. You can structure an application. You finish able to make an architectural decision, write it down, and defend it to a room that disagrees.

Every module has six parts#

1. The Idea - the concept in plain language, before any code
2. Build It - working code you type, run, and break
3. The Principle - the named industry practice underneath, with its source
4. Elsewhere - the same idea in Django, Rails, Laravel, Express or Spring
5. When Not To - the situation where the practice makes your software worse
6. Check Yourself - the graded exercise

How grading works#

Your code working is worth almost nothing.

Anyone can copy a route from a chapter into a file. Software gets built by people who understand what they pasted, and maintained by people who can explain it eighteen months later at 2am. So this course grades comprehension, and it grades it hard.

Two gates. Does it run, checked by dispatching real requests through the real framework, worth 30 marks at Level 1 falling to 15 by Level 3. Do you understand it, four written answers marked across Explain, Predict, Diagnose and Judge, worth 70 marks rising to 85.

The examiner is Tina4's own engine. It is built to score restated documentation at zero, so the student who memorises the chapter fails and the student who understood it passes.

You can fail an exercise with working code. That is deliberate.

What you need#

A computer, a terminal, and Python 3.12 or newer.

pip install tina4-python

Nothing else. Tina4 has no third-party dependencies, so your first hour goes into writing code instead of untangling a dependency tree.

Start with how the course works, or jump straight to Module 1.