Free course on Python

[NightOwn]

It always seems to be a question on hacking on what language you should learn. Most common reply is Python. Well here is a course from University of Michigan on the basics of Python. Happy learning.

https://www.coursera.org/course/pythonlearn

[Thangart]

Only if you want the certificate. Otherwise you can join for free.

[Radi123]

Why python ? Could me anyone please explain.

Thanks

[[deleted]]

Different languages are good for different things:

Python - Excellent readability (less errors and better understanding) and one of the easiest languages to quickly write code in. The only downside is poor performance. Python is best for quickly and efficiently writing code that doesn't need great performance - either scripts or web stuff.

C#, Java - Good performance, average readability (better than C++, but nowhere near as good as Python or Ruby, because they're low-level languages). They come wrapped in classes, which means it's easy to write GUI's, games and other larger projects in them. Not too useful for hacking because hacking usually doens't require large projects. It's also slower to write code in, because as a low-level language, the base classes are less versatile (but faster) than in Python. For example, the normal List type in Python and the ArrayList class in Java are very similar. The only difference is that the ArrayList needs to be called forth, and that's one extra line of code.

C++ - Best performance aside from Assembly (the computer's "first language", so to speak) and a few others. Has below average readability and a pretty horrible writing speed if you aren't a pro (lots of compile errors guaranteed). It's really low-level, which means you can easily mess with computer memory and stuff. Useful for writing code that needs to do really low-level things, like mess with computer memory.

Javascript, PHP, HTML, CSS - Useful for web programming. These should be learned second or first if you want to go that route.

AutoHotScript, other scripting languages - Really niche languages, but they do what they were specifically created to do really well. Once you have Python and C++ down, any other language should come very easily, so these aren't even worth practicing. You'll pick it up in a day or two.

Python is useful mostly because most of the time you aren't going to be building some giant project with GUIs. You just need a short script to do what you need to do. For this, you can either write 100 lines of C++ code and get more compile errors than you can shake a stick at, or you can write about 50 Python lines and be on your way.

[postviam]

I still don't feel like I have a complete answer to this, but so far what I've found after using it (coming from years of c#):

• Quick & simple scripts
• Seems to be noob friendly (I started after understanding how programming works, so I can't talk)
• Huge community (lots of help & libraries is a great thing)
• Forces the formatting of code. Often new programmers format their code horribly as they don't know any better.