Hi and welcome to the section on methods and functions in Python. Now if you've never heard of a method or function a very high level understanding of what they do is they can store procedures and processes and then you can call those from any other part of your application.

Functions are one of the most foundational building blocks when it comes to building programs in python. In this guide, we're going to walk through the basic syntax and also examine a few of the different options that we can utilize whenever we're building out this type of behavior in to our programs.

Now that we've walked through the basic syntax for creating functions in python in this guide we're going to examine the difference between printing something out from a function and returning something from a function and this is going to be a critical topic if you are not familiar with this type of behavior.

In the last guide, we walked through the key differences between returning a value from a function versus simply printing a value out, and we walked through the full name and greeting example.

Throughout this section on Python functions, each time we have referenced function arguments they have been the same type of arguments.

So far in our discussion of Python functions each time we have passed in argument values to our functions we have used what are called positional arguments and what that means is that the mapping between the value and how that value is used in the function is completely determined by the position and the order that we passed the values in.

As we continue our discussion on function arguments in python in this lesson we're going to examine how we can integrate the concept of unpacking into a function argument collection.

In the last guide, we walked through how we could unpack function arguments with the args keyword and that's where we place the star right in front of the word args and that is very helpful in a number of situations.

So far in the section on Python functions we have walked through a number of different argument types. We've walked through positional arguments. We've walked through unpacking of lists of arguments and then we also saw how we could work with keyword argument lists as well.

Nice work going through that section on function arguments. Hopefully, that gives you a good idea on the type of inputs that you can pass to functions and how you can work with the data that is provided to them.

We've come to our first exercise that you are going to build out in this section of the course. What we're going to build out is something that combines all of the different knowledge that you learned up to this point and the project that we're going to implement is one of the more popular coding interview questions out there, which is called the fizz buzz exercise.

In the last guide, I gave you the project requirements for implementing the FizzBuzz algorithm into your python program. And in this guide I'm going to walk through my own personal solution.