Data Types

Quick reference

• 00:05 In the last video we talked about variables.
• 00:07 In this video, I wanna talk about data types.
• 00:09 When we talked about variables, I said they're like a bucket or a container and
• 00:13 we can put things in them.
• 00:14 But what do we put in them?
• 00:16 We put data in them.
• 00:18 And there are lots of different data types, different types of data.
• 00:21 We're gonna talk about those in this video.
• 00:23 And we used some data types already,
• 00:25 not really knowing what we were doing in the last video.
• 00:27 And we put this variable firstname, we entered in John.
• 00:30 And John is a string, or the data type that John is, is string.
• 00:35 And string is basically just words.
• 00:38 We could easily have put, Hello my name is John.
• 00:43 This is also a string.
• 00:44 It's a string of words.
• 00:46 That's the first data type.
• 00:47 The second data type is something called an integer, 41.
• 00:51 An integer is just a number.
• 00:53 It's a whole number.
• 00:54 Don't confuse it with a decimal, 41.2123.
• 00:57 That's not an integer.
• 00:59 An integer is just a whole number.
• 01:01 And you can see, we did not put quotation marks around this.
• 01:04 You generally don't put quotation marks around numbers.
• 01:07 If you do, it is no longer a number.
• 01:10 This is a string now because we put quotation marks around it.
• 01:13 So that's very sort of interesting, right?
• 01:15 If integers are whole numbers, the next data type is called a float and
• 01:19 a float is decimals.
• 01:21 So 41.12, that's a float.
• 01:23 It's floating point number basically.
• 01:26 Whenever you're using numbers,
• 01:27 it's important to designate whether you're using an integer or a float.
• 01:31 But most of the time you're gonna use a float because how often do you just use
• 01:35 plain integers?
• 01:36 If you're talking about a shopping cart online where people are buying things.
• 01:40 They're buying it with money, something costs $29.95 that's a float.
• 01:44 So the next data type is a boolean.
• 01:47 And boolean is either a true or false, that's what boolean means.
• 01:51 We'll see later on why this is important.
• 01:53 There's a couple of more data types.
• 01:55 One is an array, and we'll talk about arrays a few videos from now.
• 01:58 Arrays are very important in any programming language,
• 02:02 any web development you're gonna be doing, you're gonna be using arrays, probably.
• 02:06 An array is a data type.
• 02:07 An array is just like a variable only with a variable,
• 02:11 you're putting one thing inside of it.
• 02:13 It's a bucket that holds one thing.
• 02:15 An array holds lots of things.
• 02:17 So that's the main difference between the two.
• 02:20 The next data type is something called an object.
• 02:22 That's much more advanced.
• 02:23 We'll talk about that maybe later on.
• 02:26 Finally, the last one is null.
• 02:28 I'ts just N-U-L-L.
• 02:30 And null means nothing, blank absolutely nothing.
• 02:33 In fact, if we type in echo and look as I start to type a variable name F-I-R,
• 02:39 our cloud development tool suggest, it realizes that this is a our variable.
• 02:44 So we don't have to type it all the way out.
• 02:46 You can click on it or
• 02:46 you can just hit the Tab button on your keyboard and that'll work.
• 02:50 So if we save this come back here and reload.
• 02:53 We just have absolutely nothing.
• 02:55 If we view our page source, there's absolutely nothing there.
• 02:58 It's just null, it's just nothing.
• 03:00 So there are certain circumstances where that's important,
• 03:02 we'll get into that later on.
• 03:04 But those are the main data types, strings, integers, floats, booleans,
• 03:08 arrays, and objects, and sometimes null.
• 03:10 In the next video,
• 03:11 we're gonna talk about math and specifically arithmetic operators.

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