Good evening, everyone. I have, but one quick inquiry. What are the best resources in your opinion to learn python by yourself as a complete beginner? Thank you all
I learned python by finding something I wanted to make, then referencing the documentation to learn things I didn’t already know.
If I had trouble with finding it in the docs or understanding, I would just YouTube it/ duckduckgo it until I found a video that made sense.
I just did that over an over again and now about 30% of my day job is writing python.
Highly recommended Automate the Boring Stuff. It’d a free tutorial on YouTube and you learn things like printing, using numbers, then opening files and manipulating data. It’s useful straight away.
Certainly not the best, but codecademy is decent. After that, it should be enough for you to learn more deeply from official Python documentation, actual Python code base (from OSS repositories), and specific subjects from blog articles.
But it will highly depend on what type of content you like. For example some people may prefer books over interactive courses. If this is your case, i think this one is recognized as a very good one: https://learnpythonthehardway.org/python3/
https://exercism.org/tracks/python is a good one. You can get a mentor to review and ask questions to.
And also running through FutureCoder
Tutorial on python.org.
The Python docs are outstanding and I would definitely recommend giving that a try before moving to something perceived as more approachable.
I understand why you ask this question, but really the fastest way to learn is to decide what you want the computer to do and start looking for that.
One thing will lead to another and you’ll learn lots of things that way, while you’re immediately using it.
Tutorials and courses can work, but usually it works best if you use whatever you are learning.
So come up with an idea for a program, and start building. There will be mistakes, anger, frustration and cursing involved, but you will learn a lot.
First at the lower level, and later on you will probably start wondering how to structure it all. And then you’ll learn about that too.
My point? Just dive in, fall on your face a couple of times and you’ll learn a lot in a short time.
Think Python is a top quality book for learning. The latest version of Think Python by Allen B. Downey is available for free online in the form of interactive Jupyter notebooks hosted on Google Colab meaning you don’t need to set up, install, or configure anything up front to start learning to program using python. I think it’s 100% the best way for complete beginners to start.
While you’re working through Think Python, you can get real time feedback and answers here in !python@programming.dev (https://programming.dev/c/python) or:
They are all quite active and helpful to new learners.
When you are ready to install and run Python locally on your hardware you can refer to the Official Python Documentation. There is a section dedicated to installing and using Python
After you get the basics (others covered that), what I like to do when learning a new language is make a series of simple games.
Things like:
- Guess the number (user input)
- Hangman (more complex user input)
- Pong (even more complex user input, graphics, hit detection, etc)
- Space invaders (arrays, ways to increase difficulty including qty and speed)
Etc. Good luck and enjoy learning!
For me it’s all about books… From https://inventwithpython.com/pygame/ to https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/thinkcspy/index.html
iPython makes experimenting in an interactive manner so easy, I use it every day.
Definitely my preference. However, for someone just starting (and not used to pressing TAB or calling help() ), an empty prompt might be intimidating.
That’s why I typically suggest interactive tutorials, e.g. any of these two: https://www.learnpython.org/en/Hello%2C_World! https://futurecoder.io/course/#IntroducingTheShell
I would start with codecademy for a gentle intro and then move on to one of the books
I always like to check out freecodecamp for anything new I want to learn about.
I always recommend this one:
https://www.w3schools.com/python/default.asp
Because the topics are sorted, easy to find and bite sized.
Your experience may vary but I’m a network engineer who learned Python and I think learning regex and pandas is invaluable. Depends on what you want to build though. As far as learning resources, I’ve always liked w3schools, it’s free and to the point.
For books, python 101 by Michael Driscoll is very good. I wouldn’t spend money on courses. They can be pretty demotivating and expensive.
