Wrapping Up: Summary and Tips

00:00 That finishes these five quick review exercises. You created directories and files, moved a file around, and also deleted files and directories. Along the way, you practiced a couple of skills.

00:13 Here’s a quick recap of the tips that you might have agglomerated while going over these past couple of lessons. You used the IDLE REPL, which is a read-evaluate-print loop of a program that comes with installing Python, called IDLE.

00:28 You could have also used another Python interpreter, the one of your choice, and it should give you a similar response. So it’s, it’s just about being inside of a read-evaluate-print loop, where once you type a command, it gets executed right away.

00:45 You added tasks as comments in there, so you somewhat treated your REPL session as a file where you could also take comments just to sort your brains and know what is the task that you’re going to work on next. Then you did tackle one task at a time.

01:02 So by just copying over the instructions, you just took a look and were like, Okay, so this is what I’m going to focus on next, and then completed that before moving on to the next task.

01:13 There was even a time when you split up a task into two subtasks, so don’t get too stuck with an instruction when it’s there. If you see that it’s maybe two instructions in one, then you can still split it up, and making them as granular as possible is going to make it much easier for you to manage to tackle it.

01:32 Then you also checked the effects of the code that you wrote in your graphical user interface by swapping over to your Finder or Explorer and just see what happened on your computer through a different lens, so to say—not just through the code that you write, where you also did some checks with .exists(), for example, but also by looking directly into the graphical user interface, see a folder pop up, see a file pop up, and then see them vanish again.

01:59 Finally, you also double-checked before executing potentially damaging commands. So it’s something to keep in mind that the code that you’re writing here can cause damage because you’re interacting with your file system, and if you delete a file there, it’s gone.

02:14 So before you went to delete a folder that also contained files, you just made sure that it is actually the resource that you want to delete before running this potentially damaging and harmful operation.

02:27 So just a heads up, always keep in mind that if you aren’t careful with some of this code, you can actually cause damage, and that’s important both for yourself as well as for programs that you might write that would run on other people’s computers.

02:42 Always keep in mind that your program is a guest on another person’s computer, so you definitely don’t want to cause any damage there.