To begin, open up your browser and head over to this URL
Now, if you didn't want to type all of that out and make some typos and errors
and not get to the right place,
then simply just head over to the course resources and click on the link there
It'll take you directly to this page
Now, once you've clicked on the link that takes you to the starting Replit,
you should see something that looks like this
And the first thing I want you to do is to go ahead and click on the Fork button
What this is going to do is it's going to create a version of that
same Replit that you'll see me working through in the videos
But in this case, you'll be able to edit it
So if you want to save the work that you're doing,
I recommend signing up to Replit
It's completely free, you don't need any credit cards or anything
Once you've created your account on Replit,
it will take you to the previous page where you can now
actually click the Fork Repl button
And what that will do is it'll create a copy of what I've created
and put it into your account
And then you'll be able to see a record of all of the code
that you've written throughout the course
In this course,
you'll be coding along with me on Replit
and completing a whole bunch of interactive coding exercises in our Replit classroom
So go ahead, pause the video, sign up to Replit
and make sure you've forked the starting copy of day1-printing-start.
And you should be on a screen that looks like this
And once you're signed in,
then you can actually go ahead and edit the name of the Replit
or add a brief description
and you'll be able to access it later on through the My Repls folder
Now, once you've done that,
then let's go ahead and walk through
some of the different parts of Replit that you'll be using
First, on the left-hand side pane here,
you've got some files
and you can see the current file that's open is this Python file here
And you can create new files or you can create new folders
And later on, we'll be using these features to organize our code
Now the other part of the left-hand side pane that's really useful is the Settings tab here
And I recommend everybody to switch their font size up to large
This just makes it so much easier to identify mistakes and any typos you make
Now we're going to leave everything else as it is,
and you can click on the Settings button to collapse that pane
so that you end up with more space for writing code
And this area here is where you're going to be doing that
All of your code is going to go inside here
And once we're done with writing our code,
we'll click Run and it will execute and the results of our code
will come up over on the console in the right here
And I generally prefer to code using a darker background
It's slightly easier on my eyes, especially when you're working at night
So these are some of the most important parts of Replit,
but the important thing is it allows us to just get started
Now remember that the whole reason why we're learning to program
is to be able to tell the computer what it needs to do
and for it to follow our commands
So let's go ahead and tell the computer to do something
And we're going to do that by writing our first line of code.
So in this case, I'm creating something called a print function,
which is just the word print all in lowercase
and then followed by a set of parentheses
Now inside these parentheses,
I'm going to tell it what I want it to print
And hopefully it's going to output that inside our console
So I'm going to start off by writing the classic "Hello world!" inside here
And then once you're ready, then go ahead and click Run
After a few seconds, you should see the computer follow your command
namely printing the words that you told it to print
inside the console or the output area over here
And once it's done,
it indicates that with the little orange arrow
And the way that this command works is super simple
You have the keyword print followed by a set of parentheses
and then inside the parentheses, you tell it what you want it to print
And once you've inserted that,
then when this line of code gets executed by the computer,
it'll know to simply print or output the thing that you've placed in between the parentheses
But notice here that it's not just the word Hello world exclamation mark
that I've put inside my parentheses
I've also added some quotation marks or double quotes around the word
And the reason why I've done this is
so that I can tell the computer that this bit here in between the double quotes is not code
It's not like print where it's supposed to do something
This is just some text that I've made up that I want it to print out
And these pieces of text in programming lingo is known as Strings
And you can imagine it as almost like a pearl necklace, right?
It's a string of characters
And what the double quotes do is
they basically show the beginning and the end of that string of characters
So that means you have to be really careful when you're typing
For example, if I go ahead and I miss out the closing double quote,
well now you can see that there's some changes that have happened to our code already
Namely that the last parenthesis,
instead of being colored in white like the opening parenthesis
or how it used to be,
it's now colored in orange
And this is a subtle hint to us
You're going to get really attuned to these subtle hints
because they are the clues that will tell you what might've gone wrong in your code
If I run this code as it is right now, it's going to break
It's going to give me a SyntaxError
and it says something that seems like it's completely non-English
So how can we figure out what this means?
Now, the thing I want you to know is that
all programmers make mistakes
We all make lots of errors
like forgetting to add the double quotes at the end of the String
or forgetting to add a closing parenthesis
These things are just common errors because we're human
But the thing that differentiates great programmers is
we're really good at figuring out what the problem is and how to fix it
So you can imagine that coding is just
a whole bunch of problems that you have to solve.
And in this case,
when we get some sort of red text on the right
and our code is not doing what we expect it to do,
then all we have to do is take this entire error message where it says
something, something error,
and this is some sort of message that we're supposed to understand
And we're simply going to drop it into Google
And usually the first link you come across will be from
a website called stackoverflow.com
And this is basically the Q&A website that all developers will go to
whenever something is wrong with their code
or when they can't figure out how to do something
So if we click on this link,
you can see that somebody else has also had this error
and some kind souls have told us that the solution might be
the fact that you're missing a double quote before the end of the line
So if we take a look back at our code,
the code that generated this error looks like this
And indeed we are missing a double quote at the end of our String
As you're learning to code, as you're going through your hundred days,
I want you to become more and more attuned to the color of your code
because one of the most helpful things that code editors such as this do for us
is something called syntax highlighting
For example, when I was missing that double quote,
it highlighted this entire thing in this orange color
and that is basically it telling us it seems like this whole thing is some text,
it thinks that all of this is a string,
and that we're missing a closing parenthesis
So if you notice this and you're like, wait, actually that's not right
This part should be orange because this is what I want to be printed
But this part should match the color of the open brace, which is white
So there must be something wrong here
And indeed if you have a look at the error message,
it actually has a little caret sign right here
showing you that there's something that's probably not right here
and it might jog your memory that,
Oh yeah, I've forgotten a closing double quote
And now when we run our code, you'll see that it's good as new
So now it's your turn to try it out in a code challenge
Head over to the next lesson, sign up to our classroom,
and then I'll guide you through getting started on your first coding challenge
So all of that and more, I'll see you on the next lesson