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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, add comments to our scripts.

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For example, right here I added a comment of Booleans and this tells the Python interpreter, Hey,

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this is a comment, don't run this.

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It's just for me.

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You can just ignore it and skip over to line two.

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And you saw that?

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I simply did that in Python with the pound sign.

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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.

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And although this may look like two lines, it's actually just the ward rapping that's happening.

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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.

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And this is something that comes with practice.

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But here are some key guidelines.

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When you're commenting your code, 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 name variable, a value of Andre

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string, a comment like this.

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Is not really good.

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Why is that?

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Well, because your code should be self explanatory, 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.

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And any python programmer would know that here we're just simply adding Andre as a value of name.

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We're assigning a variable and adding a comment like this that's self explanatory.

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Just adds clutter to your code.

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So there's a trade off here.

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

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they want to understand your code.

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But you have to remember this principle of code being easy to read.

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The only time you want to add comments to your code is.

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Well, when something really, really important is happening, where it might be a little complex,

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you first decide, Hey, is this code written in a way that makes sense?

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For example, if this was variable a.

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And this was variable B.

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Well, this might be really hard for somebody to understand.

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So you might say that this is is flag.

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But before you add that comment, you want to say to yourself, Hmm, 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 do's 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, so I highly recommend

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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.