Coding All-in-One For Dummies

The go-to guide for learning coding from the ground-up Adding some coding know-how to your skills can help launch a new career or bolster an old one. Coding All-in-One For Dummies offers an ideal starting place for learning the languages that make technology go. This edition gets you started with a helpful explanation of how coding works and how it’s applied in the real-world before setting you on a path toward writing code for web building, mobile application development, and data analysis. Add coding to your skillset for your existing career, or begin the exciting transition into life as a professional developer—Dummies makes it easy. Learn coding basics and how to apply them Analyze data and automate routine tasks on the job Get the foundation you need to launch a career as a coder Add HTML, JavaScript, and Python know-how to your resume This book serves up insight on the basics of coding, designed to be easy to follow, even if you’ve never written a line of code in your life. You can do this.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1 About This Book 2 Foolish Assumptions 2 Icons Used in This Book 3 Beyond the Book 4 Where to Go from Here 4 Book 1: Getting Started with Coding 5 Chapter 1: What Is Coding? 7 Defining What Code Is 8 Following instructions 8 Writing code with some Angry Birds 9 Understanding What Coding Can Do for You 10 Eating the world with software 10 Coding on the job 12 Scratching your own itch (and becoming rich and famous) 13 Surveying the Types of Programming Languages 13 Comparing low-level and high-level programming languages 14 Contrasting compiled code and interpreted code 15 Programming for the web 16 Taking a Tour of a Web App Built with Code 16 Defining the app’s purpose and scope 16 Standing on the shoulders of giants 17 Chapter 2: Programming for the Web 19 Displaying Web Pages on Your Desktop and Mobile Device 20 Hacking your favorite news website 20 Understanding how the World Wide Web works 23 Watching out for your frontend and backend 24 Defining web and mobile applications 25 Coding Web Applications 26 Starting with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript 26 Adding logic with Python, Ruby, or PHP 27 Coding Mobile Applications 28 Building mobile web apps 29 Building native mobile apps 30 Deploying Web Applications in the Cloud 31 Chapter 3: Becoming a Programmer 33 Writing Code Using a Process 34 Researching what you want to build 35 Designing your app 36 Coding your app 37 Debugging your code 38 Picking Tools for the Job 39 Working offline 39 Working online with CodeSandbox.io 40 Book 2: Basic Web Coding 43 Chapter 1: Exploring Basic HTML 45 What Does HTML Do? 46 Understanding HTML Structure 47 Identifying elements 47 Featuring your best attribute 49 Standing head, title, and body above the rest 50 Getting Familiar with Common HTML Tasks and Elements 52 Writing headlines 53 Organizing text in paragraphs 54 Linking to your (heart’s) content 55 Adding images 56 Styling Me Pretty 58 Highlighting with bold, italics, underline, and strikethrough 58 Raising and lowering text with superscript and subscript 59 Building Your First Website Using HTML 60 Chapter 2: Getting More Out of HTML 63 Organizing Content on the Page 64 Listing Data 66 Creating ordered and unordered lists 66 Nesting lists 67 Putting Data in Tables 68 Basic table structuring 69 Stretching table columns and rows 70 Aligning tables and cells 72 Filling Out Forms 75 Understanding how forms work 75 Creating basic forms 76 Practicing More with HTML 78 Chapter 3: Getting Stylish with CSS 79 What Does CSS Do? 79 CSS Structure 81 Choosing the element to style 81 My property has value 83 Hacking the CSS on your favorite website 84 Common CSS Tasks and Selectors 86 Font gymnastics: Size, color, style, family, and decoration 86 Customizing links 90 Adding background images and styling foreground images 93 Getting Stylish 97 Adding CSS to your HTML 97 Practicing with CSS 99 Chapter 4: Next Steps with CSS 101 Styling (More) Elements on Your Page 102 Styling lists 102 Designing tables 105 Selecting Elements to Style 107 Styling specific elements 107 Naming HTML elements 112 Aligning and Laying Out Your Elements 113 Organizing data on the page 114 Shaping the div 116 Understanding the box model 117 Positioning the boxes 119 Writing More Advanced CSS 122 Chapter 5: Responsive Layouts with Flexbox 123 Introducing Responsive Design 124 The web is mobile 124 Why are so many sites mobile-unfriendly? 124 Introducing mobile-first design 124 Making responsive web pages with the viewport meta tag 125 Using Flexbox 128 Creating boxes 129 Thinking in one dimension 130 Using multi-line containers 133 Make no assumptions 134 Aligning on the cross-axis 134 Aligning on the main axis 136 Modifying flexible boxes 137 Changing the order of items 139 Experimenting with Flexbox 140 Chapter 6: Styling with Bootstrap 143 Figuring Out What Bootstrap Does 144 Installing Bootstrap 145 Understanding the Layout Options 147 Lining up on the grid system 147 Dragging and dropping to a website 150 Using predefined templates 151 Adapting layout for mobile, tablet, and desktop 151 Coding Basic Web Page Elements 153 Designing buttons 153 Navigating with toolbars 155 Adding icons 157 Practicing with Bootstrap 158 Book 3: Advanced Web Coding 159 Chapter 1: What Is JavaScript? 161 What Is JavaScript? 161 The Eich-man cometh 162 Mocha-licious 163 We need more effects! 163 JavaScript Grows Up 164 Dynamic scripting language 165 What does JavaScript do? 166 Why JavaScript? 167 JavaScript is easy to learn! 168 JavaScript is everywhere! 169 JavaScript is powerful! 172 JavaScript is in demand! 172 Chapter 2: Writing Your First JavaScript Program 173 Setting Up Your Development Environment 173 Downloading and installing Chrome 174 Downloading and installing a code editor 174 Reading JavaScript Code 181 Running JavaScript in the Browser Window 182 Using JavaScript in an HTML event attribute 182 Using JavaScript in a script element 183 Including external JavaScript files 185 Using the JavaScript Developer Console 188 Commenting Your Code 189 Single-line comments 190 Multi-line comments 190 Using comments to prevent code execution 191 Chapter 3: Working with Variables 193 Understanding Variables 193 Initializing Variables 195 Understanding Global and Local Scope 197 Naming Variables 199 Creating Constants Using the const Keyword 201 Working with Data Types 202 Number data type 202 bigInt data type 205 String data type 205 Boolean data type 208 NaN data type 209 Undefined data type 210 Symbol data type 210 Chapter 4: Understanding Arrays 211 Making a List 211 Array Fundamentals 213 Arrays are zero-indexed 213 Arrays can store any type of data 214 Creating Arrays 215 Using the new keyword method 215 Array literal 215 Populating Arrays 215 Understanding Multidimensional Arrays 216 Accessing Array Elements 218 Looping through arrays 219 Array properties 220 Array methods 220 Using array methods 222 Chapter 5: Working with Operators, Expressions, and Statements 225 Express Yourself 226 Hello, Operator 226 Operator precedence 226 Using parentheses 227 Types of Operators 230 Assignment operators 230 Comparison operators 231 Arithmetic operators 231 String operator 234 Bitwise operators 234 Logical operators 236 Special operators 237 Combining operators 239 Chapter 6: Getting into the Flow with Loops and Branches 241 Branching Out 241 if else statements 242 Switch statements 243 Here We Go: Loop De Loop 246 for loops 246 for in loops 248 while loops 251 do while loops 252 break and continue statements 253 Chapter 7: Getting Functional 255 Understanding the Function of Functions 255 Using Function Terminology 257 Defining a function 257 Function head 257 Function body 257 Calling a function 258 Defining parameters and passing arguments 258 Returning a value 258 The Benefits of Using Functions 258 Writing Functions 262 Returning Values 263 Passing and Using Arguments 264 Passing arguments by value 265 Passing arguments by reference 267 Calling a function without all the arguments 267 Setting default parameter values 267 Calling a function with more arguments than parameters 268 Getting into arguments with the arguments object 268 Understanding Function Scope 269 Creating Anonymous Functions 270 Knowing the differences between anonymous and named functions 270 Arrow functions 270 Doing it Again with Recursion 271 Functions within Functions 273 Chapter 8: Making and Using Objects 275 Object of My Desire 275 Creating Objects 277 Defining objects with object literals 277 Defining objects with a constructor function 278 Making objects with class 279 Using Object.create 280 Retrieving and Setting Object Properties 280 Using dot notation 281 Using square bracket notation 281 Deleting Properties 283 Working with Methods 284 Using this 286 An Object-Oriented Way to Become Wealthy: Inheritance 287 Creating an object using inheritance 288 Modifying an object type 289 Chapter 9: Controlling the Browser with the Window Object 291 Understanding the Browser Environment 291 The user interface 292 Loader 293 HTML parsing 294 CSS parsing 294 JavaScript parsing 294 Layout and rendering 295 Investigating the BOM 295 The Navigator object 295 The Window object 298 Using the Window object’s methods 304 Chapter 10: Manipulating Documents with the DOM 307 Understanding the DOM 307 Understanding Node Relationships 309 Using the Document Object’s Properties and Methods 314 Using the Element Object’s Properties and Methods 316 Working with the Contents of Elements 319 innerHTML 319 Setting attributes 320 Getting Elements by ID, Tag Name, or Class 320 getElementById 321 getElementsByTagName 322 getElementsByClassName 322 Using the Attribute Object’s Properties 324 Creating and Appending Elements 325 Removing Elements 325 Chapter 11: Using Events in JavaScript 327 Knowing Your Events 327 Handling Events 329 Using inline event handlers 330 Event handling using element properties 331 Event handling using addEventListener 332 Stopping propagation 336 Chapter 12: Integrating Input and Output 339 Understanding HTML Forms 339 The form element 340 The label element 341 The input element 342 The select element 344 The textarea element 344 The button element 344 Working with the Form Object 345 Using Form properties 345 Using the Form object’s methods 347 Accessing form elements 348 Getting and setting form element values 349 Validating user input 351 Chapter 13: Understanding Callbacks and Closures 355 What Are Callbacks? 355 Passing functions as arguments 356 Writing functions with callbacks 356 Using named callback functions 357 Understanding Closures 360 Using Closures 363 Chapter 14: Embracing AJAX and JSON 367 Working behind the Scenes with AJAX 367 AJAX examples 368 Viewing AJAX in action 370 Using the XMLHttpRequest object 373 Working with the same-origin policy 375 Using CORS, the silver bullet for AJAX requests 377 Putting Objects in Motion with JSON 378 Book 4: Creating Mobile Apps 383 Chapter 1: What Is Flutter? 385 All About Hardware and Software 385 Where Does Flutter Fit In? 389 Cross-platform development 390 A quick-and-easy development cycle 394 A great way to think about app development 396 Enough New Terminology! What’s Next? 400 Chapter 2: Setting Up Your Computer for Mobile App Development 401 The Stuff You Need 401 What to Do 403 Getting and installing the stuff 403 For Mac users only 406 Configuring Android Studio 407 Running your first app 408 Dealing with the Devil’s Details 413 On installing Android Studio 414 On launching Android Studio for the first time 414 On adding virtual devices 415 On installing Flutter 416 Divisiveness Among Devices 418 Running apps on an Android device 418 Testing apps on a physical device 419 Using Android Studio 424 Starting up 425 The main window 425 Running This Book’s Sample Programs 429 Enjoying reruns 431 If you’re finicky 432 Chapter 3: “Hello” from Flutter 433 First Things First: Creating a Flutter Project 434 What’s it all about? 436 A constructor’s parameters 440 A note about punctuation 442 Don’t relent — simply indent 442 Classes, Objects, and Widgets 444 A brief treatise on “within-ness” 446 The documentation is your friend 447 Making Things Look Nicer 448 Creating a scaffold 451 Adding visual tweaks 453 Dart’s enum feature 454 Hello from sunny California! 454 Adding another widget 456 Centering the text (Part 1) 459 Centering the text (Part 2) 461 Displaying an image 464 Hey, Wait a Minute 468 Chapter 4: Hello Again 469 Creating and Using a Function 470 The function declaration 471 A function call 472 Parameters and the return value 472 Programming in Dart: The Small Stuff 475 Statements and declarations 475 Dart’s typing feature 476 Literals, variables, and expressions 477 Two for the price of one 480 Dart’s var keyword 483 Built-in types 484 Types that aren’t built-in 486 Using import declarations 487 Creating Function Declaration Variations 487 Type names in function declarations 490 Naming your parameters 491 What about the build function? 492 More Fun to Come! 493 Chapter 5: Making Things Happen 495 Let’s All Press a Floating Action Button 495 Stateless widgets and stateful widgets 498 Widgets have methods 498 Pay no attention to the framework behind the curtain 500 Enhancing Your App 509 More parameters, please 512 The override annotation 514 What does mean? 515 Anonymous functions 516 What belongs where 519 Names that start with an underscore 524 Whew! 525 Chapter 6: Laying Things Out 527 Understanding the Big Picture 528 Creating bite-size pieces of code 531 Creating a parameter list 533 Living color 534 Adding padding 535 Your humble servant, the Column widget 537 The SizedBox widget 539 Your friend, the Container widget 539 Nesting Rows and Columns 545 Introducing More Levels of Nesting 546 Using the Expanded Widget 549 Expanded versus unexpanded 552 Expanded widget saves the day 555 Flexing some muscles 560 How Big Is My Device? 562 Chapter 7: Interacting with the User 567 A Simple Switch 568 Dart’s const keyword 571 Compatible or NOT? 572 Wait For It! 574 How Much Do You Love Flutter? 576 Dealing with Text Fields 581 Callouts 1 and 2 582 Callout 3 585 Callout 4 586 Callout 5 590 Creating Radio Buttons 590 Creating an enum 593 Building the radio group 593 Displaying the user’s choice 595 Creating a Drop-Down Button 596 Building the drop-down button 600 The little Reset button 601 Making a map 602 Onward and Upward 603 Chapter 8: Navigation, Lists, and Other Goodies 605 Extending a Dart Class 605 Navigating from One Page to Another 608 An icon on a button 612 Pushing and popping 612 Passing Data from the Source to a Destination 613 Passing Data Back to the Source 618 Dart’s async and await keywords 621 Taking control of the app bar’s Back button 623 Passing Data in Both Directions 624 Creating Named Routes 629 Creating a List 633 The ListView widget 634 Creating list items one-by-one 639 Making loops with Dart 643 Fetching Data from the Internet 646 Using a public API 647 Sending an URL to a server 650 Making sense of a JSON response 651 What’s Next? 652 Chapter 9: Moving Right Along 653 Setting the Stage for Flutter Animation 653 Moving Along a Straight Line 659 Bouncing Around 664 Animating Size and Color Changes 666 Moving Along a Curve 668 Dragging Things Around 670 Tearing Things Up 673 Book 5: Getting Started with Python 675 Chapter 1: Wrapping Your Head around Python 677 What Does Python Do? 678 Defining Python Structure 679 Understanding the Zen of Python 679 Styling and spacing 680 Coding Common Python Tasks and Commands 681 Defining data types and variables 681 Computing simple and advanced math 682 Using strings and special characters 684 Deciding with conditionals: if, elif, else 685 Input and output 686 Shaping Your Strings 687 Dot notation with upper(), lower(), capitalize(), and strip() 687 String formatting with % 688 Chapter 2: Installing a Python Distribution 689 Using Anaconda 690 Getting Anaconda 690 Defining why Anaconda is used in this book 691 Installing Anaconda on Linux 692 Installing Anaconda on macOS X 693 Installing Anaconda on Windows 694 Downloading the Data Sets and Example Code 696 Starting Anaconda Navigator 697 Using Jupyter Notebook 697 Defining the code repository 699 Understanding the data sets used in this book 704 Chapter 3: Working with Real Data 707 Uploading, Streaming, and Sampling Data 708 Uploading small amounts of data into memory 709 Streaming large amounts of data into memory 710 Generating variations on image data 711 Sampling data in different ways 712 Accessing Data in Structured Flat-File Form 714 Reading from a text file 714 Reading CSV-delimited format 715 Reading Excel and other Microsoft Office files 718 Sending Data in Unstructured File Form 719 Managing Data from Relational Databases 722 Interacting with Data from NoSQL Databases 724 Accessing Data from the Web 725 Accessing XML data 725 Using read_xml 727 Book 6: Data Analysis with Python 729 Chapter 1: Conditioning Your Data 731 Juggling between NumPy and pandas 732 Knowing when to use NumPy 732 Knowing when to use pandas 732 Validating Your Data 733 Figuring out what’s in your data 734 Removing duplicates 737 Creating a data map and data plan 738 Manipulating Categorical Variables 740 Creating categorical variables 741 Renaming levels 742 Combining levels 743 Dealing with Dates in Your Data 744 Formatting date and time values 745 Using the right time transformation 745 Dealing with Missing Data 747 Finding the missing data 747 Encoding missingness 748 Imputing missing data 749 Slicing and Dicing: Filtering and Selecting Data 750 Slicing rows 750 Slicing columns 751 Dicing 752 Concatenating and Transforming 752 Adding new cases and variables 753 Removing data 754 Sorting and shuffling 755 Aggregating Data at Any Level 757 Chapter 2: Shaping Data 759 Working with HTML Pages 760 Parsing XML and HTML 760 Using XPath for data extraction 761 Working with Raw Text 763 Dealing with Unicode 763 Stemming and removing stop words 764 Introducing regular expressions 766 Using the Bag of Words Model and Beyond 768 Understanding the bag of words model 769 Working with n-grams 771 Implementing TF-IDF transformations 772 Working with Graph Data 774 Understanding the adjacency matrix 775 Using NetworkX basics 775 Chapter 3: Getting a Crash Course in MatPlotLib 779 Starting with a Graph 780 Defining the plot 780 Drawing multiple lines and plots 781 Saving your work 782 Setting the Axis, Ticks, Grids 783 Getting the axes 783 Formatting the axes 784 Adding grids 785 Defining the Line Appearance 786 Working with line styles 786 Using colors 787 Adding markers 789 Using Labels, Annotations, and Legends 790 Adding labels 791 Annotating the chart 792 Creating a legend 793 Chapter 4: Visualizing the Data 795 Choosing the Right Graph 796 Showing parts of a whole with pie charts 796 Creating comparisons with bar charts 797 Showing distributions using histograms 799 Depicting groups using box plots 800 Seeing data patterns using scatterplots 802 Creating Advanced Scatterplots 803 Depicting groups 803 Showing correlations 804 Plotting Time Series 806 Representing time on axes 806 Plotting trends over time 807 Visualizing Graphs 809 Developing undirected graphs 809 Developing directed graphs 811 Book 7: Career Building with Coding 813 Chapter 1: Exploring Coding Career Paths 815 Augmenting Your Existing Job 816 Creative design 816 Content and editorial 817 Human resources 818 Product management 819 Sales and marketing 820 Legal 821 Finding a New Coding Job 822 Frontend web development 823 Backend web development 824 Mobile application development 826 Data analysis 827 Chapter 2: Exploring Undergraduate and Graduate Degrees 829 Getting a College Degree 830 College computer science curriculum 831 Doing extracurricular activities 833 Two-year versus four-year school 834 Enrolling in an Advanced Degree Program 836 Graduate school computer science curriculum 837 Performing research 838 Interning to Build Credibility 839 Types of internship programs 839 Securing an internship 840 Chapter 3: Training on the Job 843 Taking a Work Project to the Next Level 844 Learning on the Job and After Work 845 Training on the job 846 Learning after work 846 Freelancing to Build Confidence and Skills 848 Transitioning to a New Role 849 Assessing your current role 850 Networking with developers 850 Identifying roles that match your interest and skills 851 Chapter 4: Coding Career Myths 853 You Must Be Good at Math 853 You Must Have Studied Engineering 854 You Can Learn Coding in a Few Weeks 855 You Need a Great Idea to Start Coding 855 Ruby Is Better than Python 856 Only College Graduates Receive Coding Offers 856 You Must Have Experience 857 Tech Companies Don’t Hire Women or Minorities 858 The Highest Paying Coding Jobs Are in San Francisco 859 Your Previous Experience Isn’t Relevant 860 Index 861

About the Author :
This All-in-One includes work by expert coders and coding educators, including Chris Minnick and Eva Holland coauthors of Coding with JavaScript For Dummies; Nikhil Abraham, author of Coding For Dummies and Getting a Coding Job For Dummies; John Paul Mueller and Luca Massaron, coauthors of Python for Data Science For Dummies and Machine Learning For Dummies; and Barry Burd, author of Flutter For Dummies.