Life tends to push you in directions you don’t expect, and it has for me. Recently I have felt I am being pushed to learn python based on a various situations and conversations that have arrived. So, I decided to sit down and learn python, and let me tell you it has been a fun and interesting experience.
I think though a tiny bit of history should be involved first. About a year and half ago I decided to learn python because I wanted to create a few utilities for my netbook which was running Ubuntu. I struggled for a about a week and didn’t get anywhere at all. The language was so confusing and I couldn’t seem to find a resource succinct enough for me. Various things happened shortly after and I moved on never to touch python again, for a while at least.
Fast forward 6 months and I started getting heavily involved in learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Even made a few different applications, including Sourcehold, also gave some presentations, and became very familiar with the Ruby programming language. My experience up to this point with dynamic languages involved php and my failed attempt at python.
Now lets jump to this last weekend. Based on my experiences over the last year and a half, coupled with a “have to learn” attitude I was able to do just that. I’ll be honest I am really liking python. I was unsure how I would take to the whitespace issue and the fact I had failed at learning it in the past, but things were not so bad this time because I found the best resource for me.
Generally accepting that a) learning programming can be hard and b) just because it says hard doesn’t mean it is. I jumped in feet first into this book online. I am a huge proponent of typing out all code and not copying and pasting. So was very happy to see it is exactly how this book was designed. Each chapter is short enough to get the point across and provides a solid piece of code to get you comfortable with what you are doing.
There is also some good explanations of what is going on, and the extra credit’s are really good at getting you to go a bit beyond what is on the page and think a bit more. If you already program there is a lot of mundane things listed, but I went ahead and read everything anyway hoping I could pickup something more. I do have to say doing so paid off because there are a lot of good nuggets of information in the writing.
I would honestly say if you want to learn python and have a solid previous experience programming you can get through this book in a day and start your next program the next day. I actually did just that. I started about noon on Saturday and off and on until the afternoon on Sunday I worked on going through the whole book. Then on Monday I started working on “termnews” which is a command line app I am writing, not done yet, to get the latest headlines from my rss feeds, basically I want the latest world news headlines quickly to see what is happening. So going from no python experience on Saturday morning to a working application Monday afternoon I think is pretty good, and goes to show how well the book works.
Overall I think Learn Python the Hard Way is the way to go if you want to pickup python. It can be gone through quickly and really gives you a good tour of the language to start using it right away. My next goal is to start working with Django and get familiar with that so I know what is going on in Django world as well.
