Coding for journalists: 10 programming concepts it helps to understand

Photo credit: The Daily Dot

If you’re looking to get into coding, chances are you’ll stumble across a raft of jargon which can be off-putting, especially in tutorials which are oblivious to your lack of previous programming experience. Here, then, are 10 concepts you’re likely to come across — and what they mean.

1. Variables

Variables are like boxes which can hold different things at different times. Photo credit: Wolfgang Lonien.

A variable is one of the most basic elements of programming. It is, in a nutshell, a way of referring to something so that you can use it in a line of code. To give some examples:

• You might create a variable to store a person’s age and call it ‘age’
• You might create a variable to store the user’s name and call it ‘username’
• You might create a variable to count how many times something has happened and call it ‘counter’
• You might create a variable to store something’s position and call it ‘index’

Variables can be changed, which is their real power. A user’s name will likely be different every time one piece of code runs. An age can be added to at a particular time of year. A counter can increase by one every time something happens. A list of items can have other items added to it, or removed.

They can also be combined: an age (one variable) might be calculated based on a birth date (another variable).

2. Strings, integers and other jargon for types of data

A string is a series of characters — in this case, literally. Photo credit: Kate Ter Haar.

You can have different types of variables, which changes what you can do with them. Typical types of variables include:

• Numbers — integers (whole numbers) and floats (those with decimal places)
• Text — generally called strings and indicated by quotation marks like so: “17 August”
• Lists or arrays — explained below — normally indicated by square brackets and commas like so: [“Manchester”, “Glasgow”, “Paris”]
• Dictionaries or dicts — explained below — normally indicated by curly brackets, colons and commas like so: {“Age” : 23, “Name”: “Jane”}

This is important because problems can occur when code encounters information in the wrong format. For example, you cannot perform a calculation with strings, or in some cases, combine text with numbers.

In those cases coding often involves telling the code to treat ‘7’ as a number and not a string, or even to convert the string ‘seven’ to its numerical equivalent. Computers are great at performing tasks repetitively, but need explicit instruction on what they’re doing.

3. .classes and #ids and selectors