I can run the tutorials fine. I would like a better explanation of exactly what I am seeing in the graphs, and what shows when and that it is spiking. How do I get started programming? when I tried, I got an error message. Oddly, if I copy and pasted from a sample it worked, but if I typed in the same info, it didn’t work.
Hi @mgw1111, and welcome back to the forums! 
Could you provide an example of the errors you are getting? If copying and pasting the code works, but manually typing it in doesn’t, then I would suspect it may be an issue with your keyboard settings (maybe it is introducing characters that Python does not support). But, it is hard to determine if this is the exact cause without knowing what the exact error message is.
As for examples with more detailed explanations, you should check out the examples on our Nengo documentation page.