Friday, 29 August 2014

Excellent News!

Hello there blog readers!

Yesterday, after studying for a month myself and a friend completed and passed the Microsoft Technology Associate in Networking Fundamentals exam. This makes us Microsoft Technology Associates as well as Microsoft Certified Professionals.

This exam built upon the foundations of networking knowledge that was gained as part of our degree and gave us a beginner basis of networking knowledge and i would thoroughly recommend that you take the exam if you want to gain a better understanding of networking.

https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-gb/exam-98-366.aspx

The above link is to the Microsoft page that explains about the exam and shows you the places that run the exam should you want to take it. 

Today's foray on Code Academy is on Strings & Console Output

The first thing you need to know is about strings, strings are lines of code that allow you to enter letters, numbers and symbols. 

For instance, name = "Beth!"

As you can see in my example, the string data needs to be between 2 quotation marks.

See this in action below using the following code;

# Assign your variables below, each on its own line!

caesar = "Graham"

praline = "John"

viking = "Teresa"
# Put your variables above this line

print caesar
print praline
print viking












Thats all for the moment because this post is quite long but no doubt i'll post more tomorrow or even later on this evening, such as it remains.

Good day blog readers!

Wednesday, 27 August 2014

First Go at Python!

Good morning Internet/Blog viewers,

I'm currently using the website Code Academy to teach myself how to program in Python.
If you read my previous post i mentioned that i was doing this to kill some time however, that is not the only reason.
It was suggested to me in my 3rd year of university by one of my tutors that i learn a bit of Python since we were using it in a forensics exercise. For reasons that baffle even myself, i was remarkably hostile to this idea and rejected the suggestion. However it has come to my way of reasoning that as technology progresses, so does the need to learn to program as life is currently littered with App's and Programs.
You use your phone, the text messaging is an App, almost all the functions on your phone are based off applications and the same can be said for computers which brings us full circle as to why i'm learning to program. Its necessary for the progression of my technological skills.

So, onto my first few lessons on Code Academy, The first few lessons have taught me about commenting, proper indentation (which is key!) and variables.
See below for the basics



The code from above is:

# Assign the variable total on line 8!

meal = 44.50
tax = 0.0675
tip = 0.15

meal = meal + meal * tax
total = meal + meal * tip

print("%.2f" % total)


The # is for commenting, according to my friend, its good practice to comment your code so its clear and easy to read, generally the comments state what that section of code is supposed to do. (Sorry if this is super basic, this is where i'm learning from!)

Line 2 shows meal which is the variable, the = is to show what the variable is going to be, the 44.50 is the actual variable.

You have to assign each variable its own thing otherwise it won't work, so when we skip down to line 8, we see that to add up, we can use the variable names and the command on line 10 (code academy added it), prints your code into a tip calculator!

Hopefully if your reading this and also a beginner, my post has been sort of useful. Good Luck!

Tuesday, 26 August 2014

Well, hello to the internet,

My name is Beth and this is my first post. I've decided to start a blog under the recommendation of a genius friend. 

I'm currently searching for a job and in between searching for one and getting on with life, i'm going to teach myself how to program in Python and shall be posting about my progress and what I've learned on here so keep a look out!