Learning to code on Mac and iOS

Code and text editors

Enjoying a couple of hours working to get the best text/code editor. I have been using Byword for my text / markdown editor and it works great, just the job and no need to look elsewhere. Then last week I got a Raspberry Pi and I need to do more coding. When writing code you want to make it easier and less likely that you’ll make mistakes. Get a mistake and the program you write will not work. So I was looking at PyCharm to give me a coding tool I could write files with code that can be run as a program and will also let me put code on a line and be run as soon as I hit enter. I also looked at Atom which is a free code editor because I want to have a separate tool to write files with code. Atom is a super app to use. I love the colour coding of the code. It makes it so much easier to read the code and therefore to understand what is going on. The text you see on the page of the browser is white on the black in Atom, the tags for the html code are in blue and there are other bits of coding text in green and orange. This sort of colour information makes everything more readable and understandable. It is also possible to customise the colours or just change everything by changing the theme. I am enjoying the dark backgrounds the most for showing me what’s going on in my code writing.

Learning Python

The thing I have found with learning to code is the first few lessons are easy and not a problem to follow. Then there is that point, the hump you have to get over, where the lesson expects you to have more knowledge than you actually have. I am convinced that the best way to learn coding would be to be in a classroom with other people so you can ask questions of the tutor and also discuss things with other students. Python is supposed to be an easy language to learn and so far I haven’t managed to find that difficult hump to have two climb across to the next stage.

Due to the popularity of the raspberry Pi and Python there are a huge number of resources for learning the programming language. There are websites and books to download for free to get you started. I have found one website which is interactive with its tutorial. You put the code into the page and when you are ready you click on submit. It tells you whether you have got the code right or not and that has been a quite enjoyable learning process. I will admit that on a couple of questions regarding the Boolean operators I did have a little guess. Well, it was late at night and my head was starting to hurt with all the thinking I was doing.