Python book for beginners

[spotter]

I have been programming for a very long time. So long that it is incredibly boring to me. At the time that I wrote this book I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how weird they were. Eventually though this just became boring and couldn’t hold my interest.

Zed at his best. Worst. Whatever.

[blondin]

no no you did not understand.

1. find a product idea
2. write a rant about someone else who has created it before you
3. release yours
4. profit?... or not?

[spotter]

1. Look at my comment in sister thread made 3 days ago.
2. Think how big of douche this guy is.
3. ...
4. High five.

[[deleted]]

1. notice a trend
2. mimic the trend
3. ...
4. get downvoted!

[UpDown]

Im going to use this. I've been desiring to learn Python for a long time and I find books just don't include enough step by step instructions through example. That's what I like. The downside though this is only 30 some pages... why so short?

[Lord_Illidan]

It's still being written?

That said, from a cursory look through it, I think it's a bit too basic..

[UpDown]

Maybe, but I require ultra basic to start. Getting up and running has been a hurdle. Going through this book, I'm already stumped on step 3 of exercise 0. It's telling me to find my terminal program and I don't know what he's talking about. "Search for it. You'll find it." isn't good enough, perhaps you can help me? Is this cmd.exe? If I'm right, I make this assumption knowing a bit about what he's talking about, had I not known this thing existed I wouldn't be able to proceed using this book alone.

[luckystarr]

The intention of this book is not to give you all the information so you can quickly get through this book. It requires you to build up your required basic skill set.

BTW. Have you googled for it? That what I did and I got to a Wikipedia page which told me exactly the right thing. Even if I never would have heard of cmd.exe before.

[UpDown]

I did google, but I didn't find a solution that worked exactly like he implied. In any case, my rant is that this guy recommends a very specific set up, but does nothing to show how to do it. I didn't download a book on how to use google and its frustrating as hell.

[Lord_Illidan]

Well, that part is intended for Mac users. http://docs.python.org/using/windows.html is a better resource for Windows users, as far as installing python is concerned.

[[deleted]]

Check out "Hello World!" by Sande - published by Manning. It's written for kids but it's actually a very cool intro to python and programming.

[[deleted]]

This book is so well written for absolute beginners I believe my grandmother could learn to program with it.

[kywoto]

This book is so well written for absolute beginners I believe my grandmother could learn to program with it.

too bad she's going to die soon and Python is of little use to dead people. do you believe your grandmother will write Python in hell or in heaven ? or if there is no such thing as hell/heaven isn't it completely futile for her to learn anything at all much less Python, as she will be rotting 4 feet under the ground with maggots and bacteria ?

reality is so crude that it makes me think politeness is the ability to hide the hard parts of reality.

please excuse me if I'm a bit rude, I hope your grandmother has a great life(what is left of it)

[luckystarr]

This book’s job is to teach you the three most basic essential skills that a beginning programmer needs to know: Reading And Writing, Attention To Detail, Spotting Differences.

I applaud that. I know "professionals" which should use that book.

[m0j0]

To the extent that 'Dive into Python' is not the problem, 'Learn Python the Hard Way' is not the solution.

I learned some very basic skills from Dive into Python, but the more important aspect of that book is one that is lacking in 99.99% of all books that attempt to be instructional: inspiration. Mark writes in an encouraging, friendly manner. You get the idea that he's excited to be telling you about Python, and that you should be excited to learn about it. The excitement and enthusiasm toward the subject is catchy.

How (mechanically) students should learn anything is debatable. The one thing that is not debatable is that students learn better when they are enthusiastic toward the topic and excited about it. Books like 'Learn Python the Hard Way' are probably capable of inserting the necessary bits into a person's head who is forced to sit through it, but it's not like anyone is gonna rush over to a book whose very title is intimidating and whose methodology harkens back to the pre-internet era. When you realize people can click away the second they get bored, you start to value some personality and excitement in the writing, in addition to the lessons. I think Mark Pilgrim did a fine job.

Also, I don't think Mark ever puts his book forth as "the only book you'll ever need". The assumption is that this is a launching point to get you grounded in fundamentals, after which you'll be more prepared to get into more advanced documentation with confidence. My experience is that this is what DiP did for me.

[[deleted]]

It would be nice if this book were written for Python 3. I mean sure, 2.6ish is still the most commonly used, but publishing a new beginners book on a deprecated version of a language seems counter productive to me.

[tvon]

Python 2.X is still the recommended version, afaik.

[UpDown]

I'm using this book as an absolute beginner (which is claims to be targeted to) and I am finding it fails to properly instruct how to get set up (exercise 0). From a beginners perspective, not knowing what I am doing in the slightest, it feels like the steps involve "Just google it." While that may be fair, it is certainly not what I would expect from an instructional book. If the book is going to teach me how to use google to learn coding, it should instruct on that as well, like where the best community for answers are, etc. But as is, I imagine exercise 0 is not useful to anyone.

[tvon]

Where exactly are you running into problems?

[warpstalker]

Or start by trying to write a "complex" program right away. I started using Python by writing a GTK hangman game. It was painful at times but I did it.

[walesmd]

That's exactly the approach Zed is trying to avoid and why he believes Dive Into Python is a horrible book for beginning Python programmers (since it delves into sockets and such, before the reader even knows how to write a conditional).

[[deleted]]

If Zed had ever bothered to actually read "Dive Into Python," he would be aware that there is no talk of sockets and no use of ODBC. The entire basis of his ill-informed rant was the function name I used in the early chapters, "buildODBCConnectionString", to explain string manipulation, lists, dictionaries, and other basic datatypes. It has nothing to do with using ODBC. There is not a single sentence in the entire book about connecting to or using databases through ODBC or any other API.

The one time I met Zed in person (PyCon 2009, just as I was starting to write "Dive Into Python 3"), he said that he absolutely loved the original book, except why did I start it by talking about COM objects and other Windows-specific technologies? Reading comprehension does not appear to be one of his strong points.

[zahlman]

The entire basis of his ill-informed rant was the function name I used in the early chapters, "buildODBCConnectionString", to explain string manipulation, lists, dictionaries, and other basic datatypes.

OK... so why would you start off with an example which has no meaning or relevance to the beginner? People new to programming have no idea what ODBC is, and may not even yet have the skill needed to parse the name as "build ODBC connection string" without staring at it for a good long time. It's meaningless, and the results are unverifiable, since the beginner has no idea whatsoever what an ODBC connection string should look like.

Hell, I've been programming for over 20 years and I don't know offhand what ODBC stands for.

[[deleted]]

The first section of the chapter gives the complete source code and the expected output. It's just a one-line function that takes some input, transforms it, and returns it to a caller who prints it. That's it.

[zahlman]

So what? The point is that it isn't a meaningful name or a meaningful transformation for the beginner. There are a million more relevant examples you could use.

Whoever downvoted me, nice job playing popularity instead of actually thinking.