Coding All-in-One For Dummies book cover

Coding All-in-One For Dummies

Author:
Chris Minnick
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Overview

The go-to guide for learning coding from the ground-up

Adding some coding know-how to your skills can help launch a new career or bolster an old one. Coding All-in-One For Dummies offers an ideal starting place for learning the languages that make technology go. This edition gets you started with a helpful explanation of how coding works and how it’s applied in the real-world before setting you on a path toward writing code for web building, mobile application development, and data analysis. Add coding to your skillset for your existing career, or begin the exciting transition into life as a professional developer—Dummies makes it easy.

  • Learn coding basics and how to apply them
  • Analyze data and automate routine tasks on the job
  • Get the foundation you need to launch a career as a coder
  • Add HTML, JavaScript, and Python know-how to your resume

This book serves up insight on the basics of coding, designed to be easy to follow, even if you’ve never written a line of code in your life. You can do this.

The go-to guide for learning coding from the ground-up

Adding some coding know-how to your skills can help launch a new career or bolster an old one. Coding All-in-One For Dummies offers an ideal starting place for learning the languages that make technology go. This edition gets you started with a helpful explanation of how coding works and how it’s applied in the real-world before setting you on a path toward writing code for web building, mobile application development, and data analysis. Add coding to your skillset for

your existing career, or begin the exciting transition into life as a professional developer—Dummies makes it easy.

  • Learn coding basics and how to apply them
  • Analyze data and automate routine tasks on the job
  • Get the foundation you need to launch a career as a coder
  • Add HTML, JavaScript, and Python know-how to your resume

This book serves up insight on the basics of coding, designed to be easy to follow, even if you’ve never written a line of code in your life. You can do this.

Coding All-in-One For Dummies Cheat Sheet

Coding is equal parts vocabulary, logic, and syntax. Coding may at first seem intimidating, but with practice, though, it's easy to get comfortable with its terminology, concepts, and structure. Understanding coding is not unlike learning a new language: Use it often enough and you'll find yourself able to speak, think, and write in code. Still, it's natural for beginners to have questions. There are many coding resources available to you, both on- and off-line. Ask around and you'll find you're not alone — many other people are learning. After all, coding is a never-ending education. Master one facet or another and a new one opens in front of you.

About The Author

This All-in-One includes work by expert coders and coding educators, including Chris Minnick and Eva Holland coauthors of Coding with JavaScript For Dummies; Nikhil Abraham, author of Coding For Dummies and Getting a Coding Job For Dummies; John Paul Mueller and Luca Massaron, coauthors of Python for Data Science For Dummies and Machine Learning For Dummies; and Barry Burd, author of Flutter For Dummies.

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Articles From The Book

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Coding Articles

Tips for Naming Your HTML Elements to Style Specific Elements with CSS

One way of styling specific elements in CSS is to name your HTML elements. You name your code by using either the id or class attribute, and then style your code by referring to the id or class selector.

Naming your code using the id attribute

Use the id attribute to style one specific element on your web page. The id attribute can name any HTML element, and is always placed in the opening HTML tag. Additionally, each element can have only one id attribute value, and the attribute value must appear only once within the HTML file. After you define the attribute in the HTML file, you refer to the HTML element in your CSS by writing a hashtag (#) followed by the attribute value. Using the id attribute, the following code styles the Modern Seinfeld Twitter link the color red with a yellow background: HTML: <p><a href="http://twitter.com/SeinfeldToday" id="jerry">Modern Seinfeld</a></p> CSS: #jerry { color: red; background-color: yellow; }

Naming your code using the class attribute

Use the class attribute to style multiple elements on your web page. The class attribute can name any HTML element and is always placed in the opening HTML tag. The attribute value need not be unique within the HTML file. After you define the attribute in the HTML file, you refer to the HTML element by writing a period (.) followed by the attribute value. With the class attribute, the following code styles all the Parody Tech Twitter account links the color red with no underline: HTML: <ul> <li> <a href="<u>http://twitter.com/BoredElonMusk</u>" class="tech">Bored Elon Musk</a> </li> <li> <a href="<span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://twitter.com/VinodColeslaw</span>" class="tech">Vinod Coleslaw</a> </li> <li> <a href="<span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://twitter.com/Horse_ebooks</span>" class="tech">Horse ebooks</a> </li> </ul> CSS: .tech { color: red; text-decoration: none; }

Proactively use a search engine, such as Google, to search for additional CSS effects. For example, if you want to increase the spacing between each list item, open your browser and search for list item line spacing css. Links appearing in the top ten results should include:

  • W3Schools: A beginner tutorial site
  • Stack Overflow: A discussion board for experienced developers
  • Mozilla: A reference guide initially created by the foundation that maintains the Firefox browser and now maintained by a community of developers
Each of these sites is a good place to start; be sure to look for answers that include example code.

Coding Articles

Dealing with Dates in Your Data

Dates can present problems in data. For one thing, dates are stored as numeric values. However, the precise value of the number depends on the representation for the particular platform and could even depend on the users’ preferences. For example, Excel users can choose to start dates in 1900 or 1904. The numeric encoding for each is different, so the same date can have two numeric values depending on the starting date. In addition to problems of representation, you also need to consider how to work with time values. Creating a time value format that represents a value the user can understand is hard. For example, you might need to use Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in some situations but a local time zone in others. Transforming between various times is also problematic.

Formatting date and time values

Obtaining the correct date and time representation can make performing analysis a lot easier. For example, you often have to change the representation to obtain a correct sorting of values. Python provides two common methods of formatting date and time. The first technique is to call str(), which simply turns a datetime value into a string without any formatting. The strftime() function requires more work because you must define how you want the datetime value to appear after conversion. When using strftime(), you must provide a string containing special directives that define the formatting. Now that you have some idea of how time and date conversions work, it’s time to see an example. The following example creates a datetime object and then converts it into a string using two different approaches: import datetime as dt now = dt.datetime.now() print str(now) print now.strftime('%a, %d %B %Y') In this case, you can see that using str() is the easiest approach. However, as shown by the following output, it may not provide the output you need. Using strftime() is infinitely more flexible. 2017-01-16 17:26:45.986000 Mon, 16 January 2017

Using the right time transformation

Time zones and differences in local time can cause all sorts of problems when performing analysis. For that matter, some types of calculations simply require a time shift in order to get the right results. No matter what the reason, you may need to transform one time into another time at some point. The following examples show some techniques you can employ to perform the task. import datetime as dt now = dt.datetime.now() timevalue = now + dt.timedelta(hours=2) print now.strftime('%H:%M:%S') print timevalue.strftime('%H:%M:%S') print timevalue - now The timedelta() function makes the time transformation straightforward. You can use any of these parameter names with timedelta() to change a time and date value:
  • days
  • seconds
  • microseconds
  • milliseconds
  • minutes
  • hours
  • weeks
You can also manipulate time by performing addition or subtraction on time values. You can even subtract two time values to determine the difference between them. Here’s the output from this example: 17:44:40 19:44:40 2:00:00 Notice that now is the local time, timevalue is two time zones different from this one, and there is a two-hour difference between the two times. You can perform all sorts of transformations using these techniques to ensure that your analysis always shows precisely the time-oriented values you need.

Coding Articles

Getting Ready to Code? Do These Things First

There are many tools available to help coders do their best work. Before you start coding, do a few housekeeping items. First, ensure that you are doing all of the following:

  • Using the Chrome browser: Download and install the latest version of Chrome, as it offers the most support for the latest HTML standards.
  • Working on a desktop or laptop computer: Although it is possible to code on a mobile device, it can be more difficult and all layouts may not appear properly.
  • Remembering to indent your code to make it easier to read: One main source of mistakes is forgetting to close a tag or curly brace, and indenting your code will make spotting these errors easier.
  • Remembering to enable location services on your browser and computer: To enable location services within Chrome, click on the settings icon (three horizontal lines on the top right of the browser), and click on Settings. Then click on the Settings tab, and at the bottom of the screen click on “Show Advanced settings … ” Under the Privacy menu heading, click on “Content settings … ” and scroll down to Location and make sure that “Ask when a site tries to track your physical location” is selected.

To enable location services on a PC no additional setting is necessary, but on a Mac using OS X Mountain Lion or later, from the Apple menu choose System Preferences, then click on the Security & Privacy icon, and click the Privacy tab. Click the padlock icon on the lower left, and select Location Services, and check Enable Location Services.

Finally, you need to set up your development environment. To emulate a development environment without instructional content use Codepen.io. Codepen.io offers a free stand-alone development environment, and makes it easy to share your code.

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