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As I am messing around with Arduino and its various bits and pieces I noticed quite quickly that whilst I can look through a bunch of code and pick out familiar items like serial.print and lcd.print. They seem fairly self explanatory to me. Other commands and, I’m going to call them words but you’ll understand why in a minute, just seemed a world away from my vocabulary.

My background is mechanical engineering, so limits and fits, materials, stress and strain are the areas of vocab I’m familiar with. Calling functions, variables and strings needed a bit more explanation in my world and previous attempts at understanding this went a bit wrong as there the language is the barrier. By language in this sense I mean C++, VB etc. See its getting complicated already!

If its all getting too much for you then try Codeacademy. I’ve had a few lessons with the primary idea of learning the lingo and nothing else really. The lessons are very well structured and the little exercises that go with them as well as the projects help to test your knowledge. I’m still finding that its worth while writing things down in a notebook but understanding the difference between a function and a variable has helped me get my head round a new subject for me. I will never be a code ninja but being able to understand more than a few keywords in someone else’s code will undoubtedly help me get into the position where I can look through other peoples code and understand what is going on as well as adapt it if necessary for my own purposes.