Python

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.

MIT has a free class: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-0001-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-in-python-fall-2016/

iPython makes experimenting in an interactive manner so easy, I use it every day.

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!

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:

• Matrix python room

• Discord Python server

• PySlackers Slack Python channel

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

For me it's all about books... From https://inventwithpython.com/pygame/ to https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/thinkcspy/index.html

I always like to check out freecodecamp for anything new I want to learn about.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/tag/python/

(Ignore the downvotes on this comment btw; I've obviously touched a nerve with Python developers.)

Depending on what you want to do I would consider learning JavaScript instead:

• You already have a JavaScript environment in your web browser (just press ctrl-shift-J).
• If you want to do anything web related you basically have to learn and use JavaScript .
• The Python tooling story is a complete disaster. If you want to spend all your time fight your tools Python is for you. Especially on Windows. JavaScript (which uses NPM) is not perfect but it is significantly better.
• It's like 50x faster.
• Overall JavaScript (with Typescript anyway, which you can learn later) is a better language than Python. A notable exception is Python's support of arbitrary precision integers. Using 64-bit integers in JavaScript is a right pain. But that won't remotely be an issue for a beginner.

There are a couple of situations I would maybe pick Python:

• AI. For better or worse (it's worse) the entire AI ecosystem is based around Python so you don't really have much choice here if you want to do AI stuff.
• Scripts to automate integration of third party services. Generally more common for projects like AWS or whatever to provide Python libraries than JavaScript ones, so it can be easier in Python.

It really depends on what kind of projects do you want to do?

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.

CS50P