Hey! 👋🏼 I'm the dad of 5 humans and 3 dogs who loves a good cup of coffee and an even better book. Follower of Jesus. Major nerd. Sales executive. Tech geek. BBQ enthusiast. This is where I share what I am learning as I go.
If you are brand new to coding, the term variables might not immediately register. It’s important to understand what a variable is, as most coding languages do use them.
Variables are containers that store values, such as:
Numbers:
Text:
Boolean:
I’ve recently been going deep in the world of creating shell scripts to automate tasks as I operate in the shell. I’ve seen other developers fly around the terminal like some kind of wizard 🧙🏼♂️, their hands never leaving the keyboard.
I am no stranger to using keyboard shortcuts to accomplish tasks in other apps I’ve used for years in my sales career and content creation, but the terminal is a new environment for me. I’ve really enjoyed learning to navigate and use CLI tools to accomplish tasks… and edit in my text editor of choice, Neovim. However, after a month of typing out the same commands over and over in full, I decided to teach myself to write shell scripts.
Everyone starts with the first program that was ever ran on a computer with a visual interface:
Hello, World!
The purpose of the program is to tell the Python interperter to show “Hello World” on the screen.
Go to your terminal and type the following to check for Python:
python3 --version
If you get an error, be sure to install it. On MacOS, I recommend HomeBrew, but you can use your package installer of choice. For HomeBrew, do the following:
A Little History
I have had a love for learning languages for as long as I can remember. I lived in Okinawa, Japan for the first five years of my life. Being exposed to multiple languages while I was acquiring my ability to communicate verbally seems to have unlocked a lifelong fascination with becoming a polyglot.
The first real CLI project that I built was a tool which receives a .txt file as input and prints out some data. While this isn’t the most impressive program ever built, it means a lot to me, because it was the project that proved to me I can do this.
Below is an example, using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
============ BOOKBOT ============
Analyzing book found at books/frankenstein.txt...
----------- Word Count ----------
Found 75767 total words
--------- Character Count -------
e: 44538
t: 29493
a: 25894
o: 24494
i: 23927
n: 23643
s: 20360
r: 20079
h: 19176
d: 16318
l: 12306
m: 10206
u: 10111
c: 9011
f: 8451
y: 7756
w: 7450
p: 5952
g: 5795
b: 4868
v: 3737
k: 1661
x: 691
j: 497
q: 325
z: 235
æ: 28
â: 8
ê: 7
ë: 2
ô: 1
============= END ===============
I may come back to this later and add some other features. I’ve considered adding additional file types to be analyzed and building in more data types to be returned.
One of my first Python projects was to build a CLI version of the classic game Asteroids.
You can find it here.