The geeks have inherited the earth. A couple decades ago if you talked with friends in a chat room, you were cast as a socially-awkward nerd. Doing the same today just means you're a typical Facebook user. Broadband Internet connections and smartphones have taken the Information Age that technically started in the 1970s with PCs and pushed it into daily mainstream life.

Don't get me wrong: You should learn to program. But lost in this hype is a plainspoken reason: NO, SERIOUSLY, WHY SHOULD I LEARN TO CODE?

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I had the idea to use Google Maps' API to draw out a map of all the Muni routes. This would have the benefit of the system map PDF but also be easier to load and navigate. I have no experience using the Google Maps API and am vaguely aware that there's public data about Muni bus routes, but I'll learn along the way.

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HTML is not a programming language. You can't write a "program" that, say, calculates the average of ten numbers with HTML. While some may point out that HTML is a "markup language", this doesn't clarify how that is different from a programming language. This isn't meant to be a thorough argument, but rather a brief explanation that goes just a bit more in detail than "HTML isn't a programming language but instead a markup language."

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I've created a series of video screencast tutorials for Scratch. Scratch is a block-based programming environment from MIT. It is a programming education toy that is made for kids between the ages of 8 and 16. The screencasts can be found at InventWithScratch.com

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This tutorial tells you how to write a Python script that can scan Reddit and download images from Imgur submissions you find.

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It can be difficult to see how other number systems (such as binary and hexadecimal) work since they have a different amount of numerals than the ten numerals of decimal. But imagine that you are counting in these number systems using an old-fashioned analog odometer that has a different amount of numerals for each digit.

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This is a continuation of Part 1.

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In this blog post, I’m taking a game off of Pygame.org and going through it to make it more readable and extend its functionality.

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A text-style game is a common project for beginner programmers. These can be fun to do, but also require spending time up-front to design it is worthwhile. Before you start designing your own game, look at the design decisions of a few different text-style game genres.

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