Using CoderPad - Python Tutorial

- [Narrator] Although watching the course videos is an important, crucial part of this course, it's not the only part. To get the most out of this course, you're going to want to follow along at home as well. I recommend that you download the course exercise files, available through a direct download link on this page, or through the course GitHub page, and the link to that is on the course site as well. The course exercise files contain begin states and end states for each piece of code in each video in the course. The begin state is marked with an underscore B, and the end state is marked with an underscore E. That way, you can write the code yourself or just play around with it and run what I've already written as you see fit. There are also three challenges in this course, and each challenge uses embedded software called CoderPad in order to provide you with an in-browser programming experience. Simply click over to the challenge, read the instructions, type your solution, and see how you did. I recommend that you use CoderPad on a desktop browser. You can use the LinkedIn Learning mobile app and write the code on your phone with your thumbs, but why would you do that to yourself? There are four screens in CoderPad. You can enlarge them and shrink them as you see fit with these little handles here. The first screen you're going to want to look at is the instructions. I wrote them myself, and they are very important. They will tell you all about the challenge, what the expected output is with examples, and where to go for more hints and practice if you need them. The answer screen is just to the right of that, and this is where you'll enter your code. I've tried to make this as easy as possible, so in general, you'll see an empty function. It just has the function, name, the arguments here, and all you have to do is put your code inside of it. Just below that is the test code, so this isn't too exciting, but it does show you how your function will be called. I don't show you the exact values used in the list that will be past your function, so that's a little bit of a surprise after you run it for the first time. If you don't like surprises, you can of course, run your code at any time. It may fail, but it will also show you the values being used to test your code. So feel free to do that and to run your code, of course, just use the Test My Code button on the bottom right, and then direct your attention to this fourth screen here. This is the console output, so you especially want to look at this if your code is failing and you don't know why. You're going to see all your program output, print statements and errors that will help you debug your code.