Welcome to the learncs.online forum, and to learncs.online! We hope that these online materials will help guide you as you begin your journey in programming and computer science.
Community Spirit
learncs.online is a supportive, welcoming, and loving community. We know that learning to program is hard and can frequently be frustrating—it can even be frustrating after you’ve been doing it for years or even decades! But that’s all the more reason that we need to keep a positive and supportive attitude at all times.
You can learn how to code, as long as you don’t give up. By helping and interacting with each other in positive and nurturing ways, we can help keep each others spirits up and all move forward together toward our goal. Abusive or unsupportive behavior will not be tolerated in this community. We get enough abuse from the computer itself—we don’t need more from each other.
Forum Etiquette
Feel free to ask questions on this forum, although keep in mind that staff here are volunteers, and so response times may vary.
The only critical rule is to never post solution code! Our homework problems are for everyone to use to learn, and if you post solutions you prevent other students from learning. We’ll remind you the first time, but repeated violations will cause you to be banned. You can post a human-language description of your code, and error messages, but not your solution on attempted solution.
Please also don’t send repeated unsolicited private messages to staff or other learners requesting help. We do want to support your learning, which is why we’ve made all of the materials on learncs.online publicly available. But there is a limit to how much direct support we are able to provide to individual students.
Posting Code
If you are posting code on the forum, please format it properly so that we can read it and so that we can run it! Here’s how to do that. For Java code, start with three backticks, java, and then close with three more backticks. Like this:
```java
System.out.println(“Hello, Java!”);
```
That ends up rendering like this:
System.out.println("Hello, Java!");
With the code nicely formatted and ready to run! Kotlin is similar:
```kotlin
println(“Hello, Kotlin”)
```
println("Hello, Kotlin!")
Hopefully you get the idea! Also include proper indentation, since without it code is essentially unreadable:
boolean test = true;
if (!test) {
if (test) {
if (!test) {
if (test) {
System.out.println("Here");
}}}}}
Good luck finding the mismatched brace here. In contrast:
boolean test = true;
if (!test) {
if (test) {
if (!test) {
if (test) {
System.out.println("Here");
}
}
}
}} // now we can see it!
Welcome
Overall welcome, and we hope that you have a great start to your journey in computer science! We’re glad you’re here.