Assignment Operators

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video I want to talk about assignment operators.
• 00:07 In the last video we talked about variables, and
• 00:09 to create a variable we just name it and then put this equal to and
• 00:12 then whatever we want to put into the variable.
• 00:15 Well, this equal to is an assignment operator.
• 00:18 So we are assigning the string John Elder to this variable.
• 00:24 If you remember a couple of videos ago, we had comparison operators and
• 00:29 one of them was equal to.
• 00:31 So 5 is equal to 5.
• 00:33 The reason why we had double equal to signs there is because a single equal to
• 00:37 sign is an assignment operator, we're assigning this to this variable.
• 00:42 Here, we don't want to assign anything, we're not assigning 5 to 5,
• 00:46 we're comparing, and so we use double equal to.
• 00:49 That's just a little interesting bit of trivia there.
• 00:51 I wanted to mention since I mentioned it a couple of videos ago, but this is
• 00:54 the assignment operator, very important, it's not the only assignment operator.
• 00:57 There's a lot of other ones.
• 00:58 So let's go through here and make a list Assignment Operators.
• 01:03 You're going to notice a theme assignment operators, comparison operators,
• 01:08 these operators,
• 01:09 sort of a computer sciencey term that you're going to see over and over again.
• 01:14 So obviously the equal to sign, that's our main assignment operator.
• 01:18 There's a bunch of other ones too.
• 01:19 So we can go +=.
• 01:21 We can go -=.
• 01:23 We can go *=, /=, %=, **=.
• 01:29 Basically our math operators, we can turn them into assignment operators.
• 01:33 So what in the world does this mean?
• 01:35 Let's come up here and let's go price = $5, all right?
• 01:41 So puts price.
• 01:44 If we save this and run it obviously, it's just going to output 5.
• 01:47 Well, what if we want to change that and we want to add $3?
• 01:52 Well, normally you would have to go price = price + 5, what did we say, $3.
• 01:59 So if we puts price now, save this and run it, we see the first time,
• 02:04 it's 5, and then it becomes 8.
• 02:06 Well, this is an awful lot of stuff to write, and
• 02:09 whenever you're writing computer code, you want to be as elegant as possible.
• 02:13 You want to write as little code as possible, mostly because we're all lazy
• 02:17 and we just don't like to type, but also because it's easier to read as you go on.
• 02:20 So an assignment operator would work great here.
• 02:23 And to do that we just price += 3.
• 02:27 So what we're doing here is we're assigning and adding.
• 02:31 We're adding and assigning.
• 02:33 So the adding sign is first, followed by the assigning operator, so add and assign.
• 02:38 So we take our price which is 5, we add 3, and then assign that total back to price.
• 02:44 So 5 becomes 8 if we've done this correctly.
• 02:48 And sure enough, 5 and 8, change this to 2, 5 and 7.
• 02:54 So, like I've said, we can do this with all of our math operators,
• 02:58 we can subtract and assign just as easily. 5 and 3, and do all the rest.
• 03:02 So those are assignment operators, very useful.
• 03:04 Like I said, I mean just look at this right here,
• 03:09 price = price - 2 or price -= 2.
• 03:13 This is just much less stuff to type.
• 03:15 That's very useful for a lot different reasons.
• 03:17 So those are assignment operators.
• 03:19 In the next video, we're going to look at getting the user input.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.