Learn Python with a perspective

Written by tallguru | Published 2017/04/24
Tech Story Tags: programming | python | training | data-science | machine-learning

TLDRvia the TL;DR App

Learning Python is quite an experience. Though the language is simple compared to other popular languages, the resources to learn python impacts your learning experience a lot.

Whether you are totally new to programming or an experienced programmer. I would recommend starting with Zed Shaw’s exercises:

Learn Python the Hard Way - Read for Free_Welcome to the 3rd Edition of Learn Python the Hard Way. You can visit the companion site to the book at http:…_learnpythonthehardway.org

It really breaks the traditional way of learning programming languages. The author has carefully driven the exercises so that the reader understands. Applause to his empathy !

A quick analogy, when someone wants to learn driving a car, many people will try push/advise you to drive a manual car first. Well it’s a nice idea to learn a manual car and move on to an automatic car, but if you are going to live in a city like Sydney and if you are always going to drive automatic cars in your life, then just watching someone driving a manual car is more than sufficient to understand how manual cars work. You can certainly become an expert car driver without ever driving a manual car. (Well in the future no one will have to get a license or drive a car by themselves, which is a different story)

This is the kind of mindset you need nowadays to learn something new. I am not saying, driving a manual car is bad but if you have an opportunity to talk fluent english straight away then you dont have to immediately learn how to write the alphabets. You can always reverse engineer !

You will clearly enjoy exercises 1–40, further I got overloaded with analogies, so for sometime I wanted a straight forward documentation. ( This could be because I am familiar with other languages )

Thats another good part of https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/, he didnt try to give a A — Z coverage of learning python. I dont think there is just one good source to learn anything nowadays. A big like to the places where he asks you to google yourself ;)

Swaroopch’s site will assist you further. Its quite nimble and straight forward ! For example, I liked the way they explained Object oriented programming:

Object Oriented Programming · A Byte of Python_Classes and objects are the two main aspects of object oriented programming. A class creates a new type where objects…_python.swaroopch.com

Further along, you might need more clarity on certain topics. For example, this article gives good explanation on super() function:

Python super()_In Python, super() built-in has two major use cases: Allows us to avoid using base class explicitly Working with…_www.programiz.com

So far I have found learnpythonthehardway, swaroopch.com & www.programiz.com quite useful, I would say these are simple & effective resources to start learning python.

The more useful resources I find, I will append to this article !

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Published by HackerNoon on 2017/04/24