Just to chip in with a plug for HomeAssistant. I am really not very techy at all, but so far I have used the out-of-box HA Green version and:

-installed waterproof exterior socket, remotely controllable -installed various interior sockets -installed smart thermometer to control our little plant propagator

So far it seems to be a case of checking that the thing you are going to buy has a working HA integration program (which seem to be added on a fairly frequent basis) and then just adding it to the network. The only vaguely difficult thing I had to do was log in to my router homepage and change the wifi mode to allow the exterior socket to connect.

I'd much rather just not use Amazon/Google/etc where possible, as I don't like the feeling of being used.

Looks amazing! One that I would love to visit is the one between India and Sri Lanka (which seems barely possible): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam%27s_Bridge

Agreed, but not for beginners. I just about fall into the second category (I am a school teacher) - I have published (internally to my school) a couple of VB apps and written a lot of code in Python, but I have never touched C. I understand nearly all of the terminology and feel that I would be able to use this to learn more about C. Beginners (of whom I have taught many!) simply wouldn't be able to use it.

I'm pretty sure it changed relatively recently and is now "put", which has over 200 definitions (many of which overlap with "set")!

Your second point is off the mark - I teach a load of kids (12-16 years old or so) who know all about pressing F12 and looking at source code, but who know next to nothing more about HTML, CSS, Python etc.

Whether or not they'd be interested in reading a book when you can just watch it on Youtube is another matter entirely!

> 2. If someone is looking in the code, they're probably ready for books beyond "HTML & CSS".

Key word in my original statement - "probably". I didn't claim that everyone reading it was beyond needing a beginners book, just that a reader of the code was "probably" ready for books beyond "HTML & CSS".

As for books versus Youtube - yep, I'm an immigrant. In most cases, I personally still prefer books, online tutorials, and online forums to Youtube. But I'm not surprised to hear that isn't the case with kids. But then again, we're discussion a book-seller's site.

My 12-yo is learning HTML/JS by reading and modifying websites' code.

That is how I learned when I was 12 too :)

Back then I didn't have developer tools though. That lowers the bar considerably to newcomers. :)

I first got excited about web design when my computer teacher taught me how to change table cell background colors, in Netscape Composer. Now I do responsive CSS for a living!

I remember the endless amusement I had using Firebug to create ridiculous headlines on yahoo.com.