Let's talk about another developer fundamental and this one is commenting your code.
Up until now, you may have seen me comment, add comments to our scripts.
For example, right here I added a comment of Booleans and this tells the Python interpreter, Hey,
this is a comment, don't run this.
It's just for me.
You can just ignore it and skip over to line two.
And you saw that?
I simply did that in Python with the pound sign.
As soon as Python sees a pound sign, it adds a comment and you can do that after a line as well.
I can say this assigns to a variable.
And although this may look like two lines, it's actually just the ward rapping that's happening.
And you can see that the interpreter just completely ignores these comments.
Now, commenting sounds very, very simple, but it's an important concept.
And if you want to be a good programmer in all languages, we have commenting.
But there's good ways and bad ways of commenting.
And this is something that comes with practice.
But here are some key guidelines.
When you're commenting your code, the idea is that you're adding valuable comments.
That is, if I add a comment here that says, Hey, this is a sign name variable, a value of Andre
string, a comment like this.
Is not really good.
Why is that?
Well, because your code should be self explanatory, right?
The idea is for us to write code that is easy to read, easy to understand.
It's not trying to be clever.
Instead, it should read like English.
And any python programmer would know that here we're just simply adding Andre as a value of name.
We're assigning a variable and adding a comment like this that's self explanatory.
Just adds clutter to your code.
So there's a trade off here.
It's good to comment your code for let's say if you're working on teams and other developers come and
they want to understand your code.
But you have to remember this principle of code being easy to read.
The only time you want to add comments to your code is.
Well, when something really, really important is happening, where it might be a little complex,
you first decide, Hey, is this code written in a way that makes sense?
For example, if this was variable a.
And this was variable B.
Well, this might be really hard for somebody to understand.
So you might say that this is is flag.
But before you add that comment, you want to say to yourself, Hmm, maybe my code is hard to read.
Maybe I should just change the variable to is cool to make it more understandable.
Now this is something that you improve upon more and more, and you do want to use comments as an extra
tool to make your code understandable.
Maybe you write code that six months from now you want to go back to understand what you did.
But remember, more comments doesn't necessarily mean better code.
You want to be concise and keeping things simple while adding comments only when necessary to help others
understand your code, not trying to make your unreadable code more readable.
We'll explore this topic and give you advice on it throughout the course.
But remember this key developer fundamental because you're going to need it throughout your career.
By the way, this article over here has some really important points that I think you'll really benefit
from, especially in the commenting best practices.
You can read some of the do's and don'ts and what some of the top programmers do when commenting.
I know it sounds silly, but it is an important concept that most courses overlook, so I highly recommend
you read over this.
I'll link to it in the resources and I'll see you in the next video.