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Hello there you beautiful people.

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And in this lecture I'm very excited to share with you a secret.

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They're all top programmers now.

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And it's one that is going to save you countless hours of headache.

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Now this isn't some super cool new tool or a magic button you press that invents the next Facebook.

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But it's a really practical piece of advice that you can use all the time.

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So what is this secret.

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Well one of the best kept secrets is knowing how to ask great questions.

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Now I know that's really cheesy but everyone gets questions when programming no matter how awesome or

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experienced they are asking questions is really just a fact of life for a programmer and learning how

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to ask great questions.

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One play to fix your problems much faster and save you loads of time and headache in the process.

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If you put in a little extra energy up front it will continue to save you time for years and years to

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come.

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When you get stuck and you always will.

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Trust me a massive benefit you have from signing up to this course is a part of a vibrant and collaborative

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community of students just like you that are facing very similar challenges and very similar successes

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.

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So in this community we're all working together as a team to help each other succeed and have fun learning

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Python and be around in the forms of macewan sections as much as I possibly can to help out.

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And you may as well make use this community in order to create a more fun and fast paced learning via

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for everyone and save yourself time when you get stuck.

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So in this lecture we're going to go over the process for asking a great question in the course discussion

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forums and by the end of this lecture you have a really rigorous and rich process for asking programming

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related questions that will serve you excellently in your future as a Python programmer on this course

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and beyond.

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I've put a link to a downloadable version of this process in the notes for this lecture.

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So go ahead and open that and make sure that you have it open.

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As you follow through with this lecture also make sure you use it in the future when you ask a question

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in this course because it'll make everything go much more smoothly.

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Trust me.

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So how do you ask questions in the forum.

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We head on over to the course dashboard.

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You'll see a tall bar at the top.

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The looks something like this.

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And even here you'll see a certain tab that says Q and A which stands for questions and answers.

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So click on map and it will open up the forums in here you'll be able to search for people's questions

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using this text box but you'll also be able to ask new questions of your own.

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So let's ask a question.

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By clicking the Ask a new question button over here in the beautiful green.

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If you have the checklist downloaded for this lecture from the lecture downloads which I highly encourage

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you to do.

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You'll see that step number one for creating a great question is to have a great question title any

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new question.

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The first thing you need to add in the question title is The Help tag to help tag looks like this.

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You open up some square brackets type in the word help and close the square brackets.

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What this does is it let everyone know that the question still hasn't been answered and that you'd still

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like some help when your question has been solved.

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Make sure to change the help tag to a solved tag that looks like this.

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You basically replace the word help with the word solved so that we all know that it's been solved and

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can look at it.

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If we have a similar problem next time.

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This will also stop you getting notifications that you don't need anymore when making you course title

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.

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Use a clear and descriptive title that makes it very clear what the issue is.

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The clearer the better.

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This is the most critical thing because if it's really easy to see what the problem is it will be much

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faster for people to figure out what's wrong.

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Whether they can help and actually help you solve the problem faster.

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Let's say our question was that values weren't being imprinted to the screen when we were running our

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script we might type a question that looks something like this would start with our help tag and then

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type answer not being shown on screen when running Python script.

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Now down here in this box we need to add a description for our problem so we can give it a bit more

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context.

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You must include these five steps in the description to have an excellent question.

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The first one is the observed behavior.

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What did you actually see happen.

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The second one is the expected behavior.

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What should have happened and what did you expect.

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The third one is a link to the code you used which will be using an external service for this purpose

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.

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The fourth one is where you think the problem might be like in a what line you think might be broken

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.

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And the fifth one is a list of all the things you've tried already.

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On top of all this include other relevant information such as errors in warning text version info and

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screenshots where required.

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So let's go through the process of creating a description by using our checklist according to our checklist

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.

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The first thing we need to do is add an observed behavior so the observed behavior might be something

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like script run successfully.

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But the answer doesn't show up r.k. Call the next thing we will need to do is to add our expected behavior

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i.e. what we wanted to happen.

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So what we might write would be.

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I expected the answer to to show up on the screen when I ran the script.

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Okay now we need to add the link to our code for this.

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We're going to use an external and totally amazing service called gist.

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So what we need to do is head over to gist.

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Get Herb dot com.

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I'll put a link that you can click on in the US in the lecture.

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Now you don't need an account for this.

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Let's add a title for a file called problem dog.

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P Y.

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And copy and paste the code into it will notice that Gist does very nice highlighting for us.

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And this depends on the language we use Python would have different highlighting to Java for example

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no click create secret gist.

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Well you've done that.

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Just copy and paste the link at the top here.

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This is the link to your jest.

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Anyone with that link can see the code and help you out.

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So will copy and paste that into our question.

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No we need to say where we think the problem might be.

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There must be something different between the script and using the shell.

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It worked in the shell.

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YS wanted to hold the issue I think is something missing that maybe some of them would write.

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Next step is a list of things we've tried already.

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While we didn't try too much.

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So I've tried running the script with different numbers.

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It didn't make any difference.

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Finally we need to add any extra information that we have error messages.

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Well there's no error message.

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Version number in three point five point two screenshots not required.

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Now that we followed through our checklist we can post this question with confidence and know that it

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is an excellent ask question.

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It's really easy to understand and is therefore going to be solved as quickly as possible.

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This is well worth the effort.

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Believe me there's an added benefit.

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It's very likely that you'll probably have solved the problem whilst asking the question which saves

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everyone loads of time.

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By the way if someone does help you out.

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Feel free to keep in touch with them and try to build a friendship to help each other out in the future

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.

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That kind of study body situation is great for making new friends and it really helps you learn much

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better when you can share ideas with other people.

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If you do make friends with someone on the course.

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Could you please send a message to me about it you've made me really happy to see that he would really

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really make my day anyway.

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Let's say I'm browsing the forum and I see your question.

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I recognize that you need help by seeing the help tag like the legend that I am.

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I come over to help.

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The question is clear and I immediately understand the problem.

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I read more and see that you're using a script.

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Check out the code and then it hits me.

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You forgot to use the print function.

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I type a message saying put the additions inside the print function.

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That should solve your problem.

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You try it out and indeed it works.

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You can mark the question is solved.

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So if anyone else has this problem they can find it and solve it too nerd of politeness.

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I send a thank you message to the helper and ask if they want to keep in touch.

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There we are.

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That's how to ask and answer questions in this course.

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There we have it.

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We've asked a very well thought out question and got an answer to our problem as fast as possible.

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Possibly maybe even made a new friend a knowing had as great questions.

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Is a secret of all the top programmers and how you have it to know that we've installed Python but introduced

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to Idol and know how to ask great questions if we get stuck.

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Were 100 percent ready to dive into the world of Python programming.

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This is where adventure truly begins.

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So buckle up and I'll see you in the next video.