Video doesn't lead on from introduction to basics. He's doing loads of stuff we haven't covered and not explaining why.

Hi Luke,

Which concepts or blocks of code from the video would you like help with?

Cheers,

Eric

Thanks for the reply Eric it's not really a question more feedback for the video.

In the python basics there is a lot of hand holidng then suddenly we're changing our previous application using stuff like abs using index += 1, position is not None etc. Non of this was covered in python basics but it's just thrown into the previous application.

No worries Luke,

If you do have any questions about the content that wasn't adequately covered feel free to post them.

I suspect there's some incongruity as the Python Basics course used to be different content, so it might be a bit of a rocky switchover from Craig's newer content to Kenneth's material.

abs() is one of Python's builtin functions, it returns the "absolute value" of a number. Its most common use is to force equality when working with negative numbers. For example both abs(3) and abs(-3) return 3.

+= is an operator that adds both operands together then assigns the result to the left hand side operand. For example:

my_variable = 5
my_variable += 10

At this point my_variable would contain 15.

The += operator (and the + operator) works differently depending on the types of its operands. For instance

this_string = "Team"
this_string += "Treehouse"

Would give us "TeamTreehouse". The operator is working with strings, so it performs string concatenation rather than addition.

Cheers,

Eric