GET INTO CODING!

Code monkey Jonni Bidwell's firmware has glitched out, so he must teach himself to code again. He hopes you'll join him for the adventure...

- Jonni Bidwell

The kids may all be headed back to school and the not-yet adults may be off to learn the ways of the world in tertiary education camps. But whatever your age, it's never too late to learn to code...

It's a trite old phrase, and one that's been jumped on by a million YouTube videos, expensive courseware and even our very own "Bookazine" department. Maybe you've already sat through classes where everything is introduced from first principles. If not, let us tell you with certainty that listening to someone explain functions, variables, loops, data structures, recursion, pointers and memory allocation for an extended period of time is in most cases frightfully dull. Or maybe you've had an apposite experience, where 'Learn to code' turned out to be code for 'here's some ugly Javascript that pops an alert with your name on it!

Anyway, coding might not be for everybody, and just learning a little isn't going to make you instantly rich. But we think everyone should have a go. Because it's actually quite enjoyable sometimes. Especially if you have an already-working project you can beam down to your home PC and meddle with.

Well, it turns out that we have not one but two such projects for you to get your teeth into. We'll first use Python to introduce some coding fundamentals through Turtle Graphics, which is a sort of Etch-a-Sketch on steroids. Then we'll show you how to make your very own Space Invaders clone in fewer than 500 lines of code. And in between these two projects, we'll show you how to use Git to easily get hold of more projects and better manage your own.

Initial conditions

There are any number of best places to start coding, which in practice is no help at all.