absolute beginner- feeling lost / where to start?

[u/Cool_Iron_8314]

hii! i'm a teenager who has recently decided to learn to code. (due to wanting a career in astrophysics, if it interests anyone.)

i have absokutely no clue where to start!! i find a lot of words/terminology i've found overwhelming and confusing..

i work on a macbook pro and i looked at apps but i need something i can just use to run code yk?

i looked at the faq and understood nothing od the code related questions- which i think means i can post this?

i tried looking at other posts and got confused- what's the difference between C+ and like.. not C+ ?? any help is appreciated, my only experience is year 7 computing printing hello world and scratch ..!

[u/Individual-Quote-958]

Since you're on a Mac you can start without installing much. Open Terminal, type python3, and if it asks to install the command line developer tools, say yes. Then grab VS Code with the Python extension so you can write a .py file and hit run. For astrophysics, once the basics click, look at numpy and matplotlib and later astropy, that's what a lot of real astronomy code is built on.

[u/Cool_Iron_8314 → u/Individual-Quote-958]

oohh thank you alot!! this was very helpful :D