Baby Steps in Data Journalism

I’ve found that novice and non-programmers sometimes don’t get much from seeing a wall of code. Or worse, they blindly copy it, not thinking about how such code runs or why it was written the way it was. It may work for them the first time. But when they try to do harder and more creative tasks – which is the point of learning to program – everything falls apart and they quit coding because it’s all just a jumble of electronic voodoo.

So the first part of this book contains a bare-bones run-through of what I consider to be the most important programming fundamentals. I skip important topics so that there are fewer concepts to juggle at first. And I believe that once you get to the point that you can make code useful, you’ll naturally go back and learn those important fundamentals on your own.