Needing help understanding functions and how to use the def command.

Hi Luke,

Think of functions are just a collection of statements.

If I wanted to print your first and last name, I could have two separate statements:

print("Luke")
print("Chulack")

or I could put both of them in one function that would call them both, one after the other:

def printName:
    print("Luke")
    print("Chulack")

Conditional statements, that consist of if, else if and else allow control flow through your programs.

Think of it like this:

name = "Luke"
if name == "Luke":
    print("It's Luke")
else if name == "Dylan":
    print("It's Dylan")
else:
    print("It's not Luke or Dylan")

We set a variable name equal to a string, "Luke" and run it through our conditionals. If name is equal to "Luke", print "It's Luke". If that's not true, If name is equal to "Dylan", print "It's Dylan". If both of those aren't true, print "It's not Luke or Dylan".

This is a simple yet very powerful feature of programming as it allows our programs adapt and maintain different states.

When you use define a function with def outside a class definition, it is considered a function. Functions in Python are first class objects, which means you can:

• A function is an instance of the Object type
• A function can have properties and has a link back to its constructor method
• You can store the function in a variable
• You can pass the function as a parameter to another function
• You can return the function from a function
• "http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2928873/iphone-dequeuereusablecellwithidentifier-usage"

When you define a function within a class, it is know as a method. Example:

The String class has a method upper, that uppercases each character.

var name = "Dylan"
name.upper() #=> "DYLAN"

You call (or invoke) a function with parentheses, if you forget to tack on parens while trying to call a function, you will be returned the function object.

Hope that helps,

Dylan