User friendly / advice

I am fresh into the world of coding and have essentially now knowledge of the sorts. I am wondering if this is a good product to purchase, peoples recommendations on which model to buy. Does anyone have any sources that they can point me to where they started, such as books, videos or forums? I would love to get into the space but simply do not know where or how to do so.

I would like to use the devterm as a mini web browser, emulator, and note taking backpack size traveler.

I am also curious if anyone has ordered recently, how long the expected shipping time is to the US. Thank you in advance!

I don’t own a Clockwork product myself yet (just preordered the uConsole) but when I started learning programming back in 2009 I would have loved something like this. The only remotely similar thing back then afaik was the Pandora (an open/hackable handheld) which got stuck in production hell. Mine didn’t arrive 'till 2014, by which time I’d kinda outgrown the need for it. :frowning:

In 2012 the Raspberry Pi came out which was a game-changer! I learned so much from it. Got lots of hands-on experience with Linux, used it to run chat bots, game servers, could even SSH into it from school to do assignments and compile stuff! To me this is basically the evolution of that, a tiny DIY portable computer running open hardware & software. For getting “real work” done, a laptop may be a better option… but for learning, tinkering, and on-the-go creativity this is basically a dream come true.

Anyways, for learning materials it really helps to have a project in mind before starting! I’d suggest looking for material on:

  1. The Linux terminal and tools (e.g. The Missing Semester of Your CS Education, A brief introduction to the Unix command-line)

  2. A programming language. Probably try to find an actual book for this… Online tutorials tend to be hit-or-miss (avoid “w3schools” at all costs, they are poor quality, they just use SEO tricks to get to the top of google). But hey, you might find a good quality YouTube series or something. Once you’ve learned 1 language it gets a lot easier to learn new ones, as they all share a lot of concepts.

  3. Whatever library/engine/framework you want to use.

You don’t have to learn these all at the same time… but think ahead a little. For example say you wanted to make a game with the LOVE framework, which uses the Lua programming language. But learning LOVE and Lua at the same time is quite a lot! So you could learn Lua first and make a simple text-based game on the command line, then move onto LOVE when ready.

Also if you want to use a fantasy console like PICO-8 or TIC-80, all the above (command prompt, language, and framework) is integrated into one playful environment, and all the functions fit on a single sheet of paper, so you can kinda just dive right in instead of hitting the books x) It’s slightly less useful long-term than the “real” computer knowledge you might get from doing things the hard way, but still relevant and still a perfectly valid way to learn! So, do whatever makes you happy!