Asking Smart Programming Questions
As a beginner, we understand that you will have a lot of questions, almost all the time. Apart from our Office hours, there are several other sources you can use to get help. We will give you a list of these other sources, but before that, let's discuss another point.
The important thing while asking a question is to learn How do you ask the right programming questions. Here are a few tips:
- Explain what you are trying to do, not just what you did. This lets your aid know if you are on the right or wrong track.
- Explain what you’ve already tried to do to solve your problem. This tells people you’ve already put in some work to figure things out on your own.
- Specify the point at which the error happens. Does it occur at the beginning of the program or only after you do a certain action?
- Copy and paste the entire error message and your code to http://pastebin.com/ or http://gist.github.com/. These websites make it easy to share large amounts of code with people over the Web, without the risk of losing any text formatting. You can then put the URL of the posted code in your email, forum post or chat.
- Say whether you’re able to reproduce the error every time you run the program or whether it happens only after you perform certain actions. Explain what those actions are, if so.
- List the version of Python you’re using. (There are some key differences between version 2 Python interpreters and version 3 Python interpreters.) Also, say which operating system and version you’re running. We will be using Python 3 for this course.
- If the error came up after you made a change to your code, explain exactly what you changed.
Some popular websites to look up your queries are Stack Overflow and "learn programming" subreddit, among many others. Altcademy also has its own question bank at www.altcademy.com/documents.
That's all for the Introduction! Let's get started with some Python now!