Easy Peasy Meow: Setting Up Your Code Laboratory And Running Your First Programmer Programs

You may already have a computer,
but that is not good.

You need a computer for learning,
you can get the pre-assembled $100 Raspberry PI 400.

There are some extras you can get,
and you will need a cheap $70 monitor, I recommend you get two cheap monitors.

Or you can get the some assembly required 8GB version,
Raspberry PI 4 (not 400).

Note to parents: When I was 10 or 12, I got a Commodore 64, that looked similar to the Raspberry PI 400,
I wouldn't know how to assemble a Raspberry PI 4, I would need someone else to do it for me.

This is a slow computer, You Tube takes half a minute to load,
but that is very good for learning web design and programming.

The Raspberry PI will work too slow,
when the programs are written wrong.

This is not a windows computer,
windows is a closed source commercial product.

The money culture propagates through the programmers,
and programs that are written for windows often cost too much.

The money culture, misleads the programmers,
to places that bring them nothing.

This is a Linux based computer,
it uses the Debian Operating System.

Debian wraps Linux providing commands,
a proper graphic environment and ability to run all the programs.

The most important program is the terminal,
just as soon as you get the computer setup.

Go to the terminal that you will recognize from hacker scenes in movies,
and prepare to write your first program.

You will join two commands together,
that is how you create a new program, by wrapping two commands.

When you connect commands,
you are connecting two boxes with a wire.

Most commands have a configuration,
for example you can configure the echo command to say hello.

Open up your terminal and say echo hello,
and you will see the word hello printed on the screen.

Now we are going to connect it to another command,
to make hello upper case.

the other command is tr short for translate,
it will accept two configuration arguments from you:

What to convert ... to what, so first you will say the lowercase letters a-z,
and then the uppercase letters A-Z.

Enter in your terminal: echo hello | tr a-z A-Z,
and press enter.

You just sent the data hello from the echo command,
through the tr command, which barfed it to the screen, because it wasn't connected to anything else.

If you want to say hello world, use double quotes,
it would work without it, but only because the echo command loves you, and is trying to be cute.

The convention here is SPACE is a sacred separator of arguments,
that is how the terminal command line can understand you.

Please think of the command line as a graphical program,
that has been reduced to text, by a very angry nerd who got tired of clicking a mouse.

Why should you drag a fancy cute wire between two shiny boxes on your screen,
named echo and tr, that have a little drop shadow maybe little flowers.

When you can just enter echo-hello-tr-az-az on the command line,
the command line is a reduction of the user interface.

It is a user interface,
reduced to its lowest terms.

When you are programming for a while,
the mouse kind of gets in the way.

You just want to keep your hands on your keyboard,
so the quickest way to program something is opening up a terminal and typing up a command.

The Raspberry PI window, that your terminal is in,
is for normal users, and all the cats who like mice.

It can be reduced to a power Grrr interface with the i3 tiling window manager,
but that is something you do later as it would be too overwhelming at first.

Still, efficiently using i3,
is a sign that you are a powerful creator (it can help you get a strange but fun job).

And you get bonus points,
for using a reduced key mechanical keyboard.

I mention this because years into programming,
people often regret not having this muscle memory.

This is not something you should seriously consider at first,
but powerful programmer muscle memory, it is something you need to be aware of.

It is similar to when a pianist plays the piano,
the notes is not something they translate anymore.

The notes are in their hands,
they come automatically.

The Raspberry PI ships with an option to install,
Visual Studio Code.

I've noticed that people already made copies of it to remove Microsoft proprietary stuff,
and get rid of their custom open license.

Microsoft has enabled Telemetry by default,
so you may wish to disable that, on principle.

VSCode is a very popular editor,
but once a true open-source-version fork gains in popularity you should hop onto that.

Executing your first command, and poking at a proper code editor,
in a little laboratory corner of your room is a big deal.

You don't have to write any programs,
just have your code lab ready.

And when you feel like you want to test out some things,
Install Node and create and run your first JavaScript program and take a look at some JavaScript tutorials.

Finally, whether or not your laboratory is secret,
it is always a good idea to practice saying "Deedee get out of my laboratory!"