Coding languages

- [Instructor] When you first get into programming, you might be unsure of which language to start with. So let's go through some of the most common languages and frameworks and explain what they do. If you are working with websites, these are the languages you are most likely to see. HTML is the one most people start off with. HTML stands for hypertext markup language, and it helps us create the skeleton for our content. With HTML, we can set paragraph text, headers, import images, but it won't look modern and beautiful because it is in fact, just a skeleton. Websites with just HTML or like those websites from the 80s, no design, only text. To add some design to our web pages, one tool we can use is called CSS or cascading style sheets. CSS is like the skin to our skeleton. It helps us format and beautified the skeleton code that holds our content. More complicated languages include JavaScript and Ruby. JavaScript adds the muscle to our web applications. With CSS and HTML, our webpages are only static. There are no interactive elements that the user can mess with on the page. JavaScript allows us to add pretty animations and has some pretty hefty frameworks, including AngularJS that allow us to add more structure to our websites. And the alternative for AngularJS here is Ruby on rails. Ruby is the language and Ruby on rails is the framework that we use to build Ruby web applications. Either JavaScript or Ruby will work as the muscle for your websites. These both do the same thing. Ruby is just a newer language. For all of these languages and tools, we write our code inside of a code editor, just like someone might use word to write a book. We'll need to have a code editor to write our website code. If you're working with apps, you're probably trying to make an app for either iOS or Android. iOS apps are created with a software called Xcode and are written either in Objective-C or Swift. Swift came out a few years ago and it's what most people are learning to create iOS applications. Xcode is only downloadable from the Apple app store. So you'll have to use a Mac to create an iOS application. An alternative to iOS is Android, and Android applications are created with Android Studio, which is a software you can download on any computer. Android apps are also written in a language called Java. This is different from JavaScript. However, depending on what you're building, you might draw from other coding languages as well. Whether you build an iOS or Android application, you will most likely learn the same types of programming concepts. So any platform is a good choice. If you are interested in analytics, R in Python are the most popular languages to use. R is written in an application called RStudio, while Python can be written using a number of different softwares. The most popular are PyCharm and Eclipse. R is known to have a steep learning curve. So if you are new to coding, I'd recommend Python as a good language to learn first. However, if you are interested more in the visualization of statistics, R maybe a better way to go. However, Python is great if you are interested in integrating data into web applications. For example, you could track how many retweets you've gotten on Twitter and put it into your web application using Python. Other languages you may have heard of are C and C. C is known for being used mainly in the graphics and gaming industry, while C is established as the language for operating systems. It may be challenging to start off with these languages, but don't let that deter you if you are really interested. Overall, the field of computer science is so wide, no matter what language you pick, you will still be learning something important. Go with what you want to build versus what you think you should know. It's definitely easier to stay motivated this way. There are foundational and essential training courses available for each of these languages in the library. So go ahead and try them out.