How to learn Python
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Discussion

Salted_Peanut

Original Poster:

1,788 posts

84 months

Thursday 21st May 2020
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Tell me about ways to learn Python. Are there apps, books or short online courses that would be an easy intro? (I'm new to programming.)

romeodelta

1,149 posts

191 months

Thursday 21st May 2020
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Udemy or Pluralsight.

Make sure you do the practical labs. You don’t learn programming by watching or listening.

Dr Jekyll

23,820 posts

291 months

Thursday 21st May 2020
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Monsterlime

1,557 posts

196 months

Thursday 21st May 2020
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The Humble Bundle has some Python books at the moment - https://www.humblebundle.com/books/learn-you-some-... For the lowest tier, some of them are decent if a bit old.

eps

7,145 posts

299 months

Thursday 21st May 2020
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https://www.codecademy.com have some free stuff, up to a limit. Try that first.

frisbee

5,623 posts

140 months

Thursday 21st May 2020
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xeny

5,524 posts

108 months

Thursday 21st May 2020
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The google course looks to have good content, but unforunately:

"Although Python 3.x is becoming more popular, this course is designed for Python 2.6 or later."

which given Python 2.x is EoL is rather unfortunate.

frisbee

5,623 posts

140 months

Thursday 21st May 2020
quotequote all
xeny said:
The google course looks to have good content, but unforunately:

"Although Python 3.x is becoming more popular, this course is designed for Python 2.6 or later."

which given Python 2.x is EoL is rather unfortunate.
They are similar enough, a lot of 3 was backported into 2. As a general introduction to Python, 2 or 3 doesn't make any real difference.

Python 2 isn't going anywhere soon.

beigepants

33 posts

277 months

Saturday 23rd May 2020
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There are lots of free Python courses on edx.org with videos. My (nerdy) 11 year old has done a couple and is pretty proficient!

Keypad

155 posts

78 months

Saturday 23rd May 2020
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I recently also started to learn Python & found "Learn Python in one day and learn it well", by Jamie Chan very useful to get me started. Usefully opens with just how to install.

Examples all through the book (as already said, you don't learn programming by reading, you learn it by doing).

The thing I've learnt the hard way is that seeking advice online needs to be done with a bit of caution - many of the examples found on the internet are for Python 2 and when you are grappling with the syntax it can be confusing. As also already said, Python 2 is "legacy" and is best left alone.

One of the slightly offputting things I've found with Python (maybe this applies to other languages as well) is that when someone asks for help, e.g. on "Stackoverflow", replies can be pretty aggressive if the question isn't exactly to the liking of the "expert" responding. Very unlike to generally polite nature of PH :-)