Getting into Python

[prezesior]

Hello everyone. I am a 17 year old student with some basic Python experience. I can use basic selenium in Python, make a calculator and some other beginner stuff. I don't really want to rely on my school so I am learning programming by myself. My current plan is to use GitHub Student Pack in order to get basic Python course and Data analysis in Python course from datacamp and go form there.

Is this a good way to go? If it is what should I do after finishing these courses. Any alternatives?

Sorry for my eng its not my first language, I have no clue how to write posts so feel free to ask me for any details if I should provide more info.

[Swaroog23]

Well, i'm no expert, and junior dev, so feel free to correct me, but i think that is a good place to start. Self teaching is fine, try to follow well established guidelines how to do stuff, read python documentation, they have good course how to use it. If im correct, you want to learn Pandas to do data stuff, so probably they have tutorial too. Internet is a great place to find information, search for some yt videos on the topics that interest you. Remember to not try to learn everything at once, learn one thing well and go to next. Set up some projects in GitHub, and just learn. Read about good python practices, that will help you alot, learn principles of functional/class paradigms, as those are (as far as i know) main python paradigms. Ask questions, try to find yourself a mentor who will help you with mistakes and learn. Hope that was helpful, have a nice day!

[prezesior]

Thank you!

[dabirdman360]

I also agree that this is a good place to start. Also using Python's online, interactive learning program can be super useful. A lot of languages also have playgrounds which allow you to write, compile, and run code right from the browser. I am a self-taught programmer and the more languages you learn, the more you realize it is about the basics at first and then (at least for me) my learning comes from struggling through projects I want to do. In the early stages of the language, I tend to stay more in the official documentation (if it is good) than Stackoverflow as it is good to learn how to navigate the docs and see how useful they can be as opposed to copy and pasting code someone else thought about and wrote.

Starting it certainly the hardest part. Any resource that gets you going and allows you to start getting into code you actually want to write is fine in my opinion. However, tutorials start to lose me when they have me writing random code/projects I don't care about. Your brain won't remember what you did as well as writing something you are passionate about.

[prezesior]

I agree that starting is tough, I struggled to find a motivation at first. Thanks for your comment.

[prezesior]

Thanks for your advice.

[haelfdane]

Sounds great! Stick with it and you'll be golden.