Complete programming novice; unsure where to start.

[TheTrinitronDon]

I've done lots of hardware-level repairs over the last few years, and do plenty of tinkering on electronics, so I'm really looking forward to using Logic Analyzer (official board pre-flashed with 6.0 FW) to help me learn more about debugging and reverse engineering. I've had it for about a month now, and I've spent countless hours installing/uninstalling packages, reading through the wiki and readme multiple times, and watching various YouTube tutorials, and I am just very, very lost.

I've used Arduino sketches and lots of drag/drop Pico projects, but I haven't written any code of my own. And, unfortunately, I feel as though every tutorial I find assumes the reader has a pretty considerable amount of background knowledge that I unfortunately do not have yet. I am also using Linux for the first time (Raspberry Pi400 with PiOS Desktop/Python 3.13.5/), and I am having a lot of difficulty understanding how to build any program, and not only the Logic Analyzer. So, every now and again I will try and read through the guide, but the instructions on installing the software is pretty much, "you'll need the files in the release and then build it in VS Code."

It reminds me of the old bit, "how to draw an owl: 1) draw a circle 2) draw the rest of the owl." Like... it took me an embarrassing amount of time just to try and change py_enable_shared=0 to =1 :/ I know the answer is "git gud," but whenever I try and make progress, the tail ends up chasing the dog and I wind up with more questions than answers. Maybe it's the flux fumes and lead solder, but I could use some beginner-level guides to compiling/building software on Linux (debian/RPi) using VS Code.

Any help or resources would be greatly appreciated!

[electricwool]

With github you need to pull the release and then pull any dependencies. unfortunately/regrettably git does not automatically pull dependencies. github dependencies are called submodules when it references another github project. then you also need to install the IDF/IDE for the chipset and probably the GCC compiler. versioning is usually never documented on github but it should be a requirement for posting a project especially python code. basically you just guess a random combination of python dependency versions until one doesn't throw an error stating that specific version isn't compatible with another module's version.

you're not using loads of dependencies to compile a hello world but as things become more complex you need to have a whole lot of development environments and libraries and dependencies. the reason it works like this is lots of individuals and companies create chunks of code to do things already so you dont need to reinvent the wheel. then programming just becomes telling it to connect different chunks together to do a new thing from the existing chunks of code. VS Code is just useful for collecting all those environments together.