Python misadventures - how no () made me :(

It turns out that the simple Python program I was trying to get running wouldn't run because of a typo in the text book I'm using: Python Crash Course (well it certainly crashed this week).

I'd jumped ahead to the chapter on Data visualization using Matplotlib and Plotly, and was getting along just fine coding a simple random die rolling and result plotting program, and everything was going well until I hit 'classes' (which I'd skipped from an earlier chapter) when I had to abruptly learn the 'writing a little program and saving it in the same directory and then calling it from another program thing' - all completely new to me, as was/ still is 'importing' various libraries.

Anyway, I had my initial 'die' program saved, and it seemed to be being called OK by the next 'viz' program I'd basically copied out of the text book, but every time I ran it, it just kept coming up with a 'variable not defined' error, and I had no idea what that meant.

I mean with my basically hacking together an understanding it could have been something not being downloaded properly, my not knowing what the difference between a terminal or a console or a notebook is in Anaconda (which I'm using as a programming environment but not at all familiar with), it could have been a typo, but I'd quadruple checked the code in the text book: bang on, and got someone else to check it too!

So why didn't it work?

A fucking typo in the text book

You fucking what?

A fucking typo in the fucking text book

And I don't mean the kind of typo that's down to some code being updated since with a Python upgrade, I mean the type of typo that missed out '()' at the end of a line of code, rendering the whole program unworkable.

The kind of thing an experienced programmer would have picked up on immediately, but a newbie, like me, like the kind of person this fucking text book is written for isn't going to pick up on.

Spot the difference:

From the text book (what I'd typed out and what wouldn't work!)

The actual code (everything else the same) that finally worked

Upsides are that I've learnt the following:

1. If I get a 'something undefined' error message in the future, I'll be sure to double check my bracket structure.
2. I'll just pull everything from Github from now on - the code was correct there, hence why it now works, and hence why I was able to make this comparison. Hence why I'm not too upset about the text book being wrong - it's pretty poor though TBH.
3. Maybe I need to get over my old school 'type and think' style of learning and just cut and paste more in general?
4. I think I need to learn to let things go a bit - I ended Sunday on something of a high as most things had 'worked' for me - Monday was a completely different story, I was up until 22.30 (that's VERY late for me) trying to puzzle out why that code wouldn't work (I just hadn't assumed it would literally be a typo in the text book) and getting no where, that was very shit!
5. I'd better get used to being frustrated, I KNOW there is A LOT more like this to come!

At least I'm back on track now....

On a happy note, at least I've got my histogram of my die roll, and in html. I think I understand all of what's going on here with the code too, at least at some level!

Now all I need to do is to stop interrupting myself every 30 minutes to document my stilted coding progress and I might actually be able to code something actually vaguely useful by the end of the year, or at least by Spring 2020!

P.S. Big thanks to @samuel-swinton who gave me some help with this and confirmed I wasn't going nuts!