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Let's talk about another developer fundamental and this one is commenting your code.

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Up until now you may have seen me comment at comments to our script's for example right here.

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I added a comment of billions and this tells the Python interpreter hey this is a comment.

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Don't run this it's just for me.

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You can just ignore it and skip over to line two and you saw that I simply did that in Python with the

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punchline.

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As soon as Python sees a pound sign it adds a comment and you can do that after a line as well.

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I can say this assigns to a variable and although this may look like two lines it's actually just the

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word wrapping that's happening and you can see that the interpreter just completely ignores these comments.

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Now commenting sounds very very simple but it's an important concept.

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And if you want to be a good programmer in all languages we have commenting.

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But there's good ways and bad ways of commenting and this is something that comes with practice.

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But here are some key guidelines when you're commenting your code.

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The idea is that you're adding valuable comments.

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That is if I add a comment here that says hey this is a sign the name variable a value of Andre string

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a comment like this is not really good.

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Why is that.

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Well because your code should be self explanatory.

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Right.

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The idea is for us to write code that is easy to read easy to understand.

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It's not trying to be clever.

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Instead it should read like English and any python programmer would know that here we're just simply

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adding Andre as a value of name.

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We're assigning a variable and adding a comment like this.

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That's self-explanatory just adds clutter to your code so there's a tradeoff here.

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It's good to comment your code for let's say you if you're working on teams and other developers come

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and they want to understand your code but you have to remember this principle of code being easy to

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read.

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The only time you want to add comments to your code is well when something really really important is

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happening where it might be a little complex you first decide hey is this code written in a way that

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makes sense.

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For example if this was variable a and this was variable B well this might be really hard for somebody

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to understand.

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So you might say that this is is cool.

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Flag but before you add that comment you want to say to yourself maybe my code is hard to read.

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Maybe I should just change the variable to is cool to make it more understandable.

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Now this is something that you improve upon more and more and you do want to use comments as an extra

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tool to make your code understandable.

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Maybe you write code that six months from now you want to go back to understand what you did.

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But remember more comments doesn't necessarily mean better code.

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You want to be concise and keeping things simple while adding comments only when necessary to help others

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understand your code not trying to make your unreadable code more readable.

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We'll explore this topic and give you advice on it throughout the course.

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But remember this key developer fundamental because you're going to need it throughout your career.

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By the way this article over here has some really important points that I think you'll really benefit

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from especially in the commenting best practices.

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You can read some of the dos and don'ts and what some of the top programmers do when commenting.

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I know it sounds silly but it is an important concept that most courses overlook.

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So I highly recommend you read over this.

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I'll link to it in the resources and I'll see you in the next video.