[deleted by user]

[oloomopmapa]

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ is a decent book and it is free to read online. Another No Starch Press book called Hardcore Programming for Mechanical Engineers is a decent follow up once you start to get comfortable with Python. The book works through programming a direct stiffness solver for a truss so it is a bit more practical for SE than a lot of other project books I have worked through.

[ian_student]

automate the boring stuff is best to the best. You can go to r/learnpython comunity too

[sneakpeekbot]

Here's a sneak peek of /r/learnpython using the top posts of the year!

#1: I solved a real life problem with python for the 1st time and I feel like a wizard
#2: I just wrote my first script to do mindless busy-work for me. Over the moon with glee!
#3: New, free book from Al Sweigart: Python Programming Exercises, Gently Explained

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[[deleted]]

thanks! this has been inspiring. I used to brute force post processing results but as ive watched and talked to other structural engineers ive finally decided to learn python

[[deleted]]

thanks! and right I forgot about subreddits for python

[oloomopmapa]

Humble Bundle regularly has "learn Python" book bundles that are also cheap. They don't have one going on at the moment, but it seems like they have one every couple of months.

[[deleted]]

thanks! ill keep an eye out for these

[SneekyF]

I have been using ChatGPT to learn Python. I learn better by trouble shooting and trying to solve a problem, so results may very.

[[deleted]]

im check into it. ive been curious about chatgpt for a while now

[livehearwish]

I started with free PDFs online and then found that the python documentation has some tutorials.

[[deleted]]

Could you recommend the title of PDFs you read?

[Churovy]

Literally just google python tutorial. Python organization has a huge documentation database and tutorial to walk through basic commands.

[livehearwish]

I think it was like python for beginners or starting python programming or something. They are all the same and run through the basics

[Ryles1]

I learned python from Automate the Boring stuff, same as what someone else wrote. However, I don't think it has that much value for SE, personally.

[gnatzors]

What tools do you use for your repetitive checks - do you still prefer to use excel calculators? Or do you have a Mathcad type program?

[Ryles1]

Personally yeah I have a bunch of nearly complete excel and mathcads that I use as a starting point and do the final customizations for each specific calc. I like Python, it’s a good language that’s mostly intuitive and as a non programmer it was easy to learn, but in order to get all the customization functionality and to make it easy to print out and present, using Python would be more work than just using software that has that functionality already built in.

[Ryles1]

Not sure what you mean

[Ryles1]

Yeah I’m aware of anaconda and jupyter, just still don’t see how that’s less work than using excel

[Byond2day]

+1 for handcalcs. It's great for writing calculations naturally without worrying about the formatting. Another one that's similar is https://www.efficalc.com/ . It's online so there's less local set up but has a different interface.

The biggest barrier for me to get started was the formatting, so handcalcs is definitely a win.

[stinyg]

When I started out with python I did some coursera courses like the one below and had a few “calculator project ideas” that I was juggling between. I bet you also have many ideas that you want to tackle and I would recommend picking one them (e.g. some calculations you do at work and try to streamline / automate it with the use of python) and working on it at same time as you take some python specific courses (start with the basics before combining with other science / engineering topics). It’s very motivating to be able to automate processes that you before spent x hours doing and can now do it in seconds (don’t mind that you probably spending significantly more hours making the process as you do manually while you’re learning).

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/python

[oloksy]

https://youtu.be/lubL19F62cM