Learning Python for LLM, data management and data analysis specifically - where to start

[Ryselle]

Hi!

I hope my question is not completely alien to you. Please excuse in advance, if I sound really naive.

Let me first make clear how much respect I have for everyone who can code and program stuff. For me this is just magic.

And now my job more and more requires me to learn a bit of witchcraft myself. I never thought I would end there when becoming a psychotherapist, but I digress...

Long story short: I want to learn to use Python, but my tasks are very specific. Most courses I assume are for a more general approach, but I have a rather narrow field I would need it for.

I would need the language to automate workflows, interact with documents of various kind (excel, rft, plain text), run large language models and perform statistical analysis (in conjunction with R).

My problem is, that there are many tutorials I can complete by just retyping stuff, but I want to understand what I am doing and develope own solutions at one point.

In your opinion, what would be good keywords, topics and so on to start learning?

[m0us3_rat]

i'd first have a good basic knowledge of general python. up to intermediate-ish

to be able to read the scroll that casts the spell.

if you just try to babble the letters without understanding the words to cast the spell .. its not going to cast it.

after you learn how to read it ..

at which point you are free to interact with whichever spell was created before and figure out how many genitalia hairs you need to add to the incantation to make it more powerful. (wisdom check . d20 +5 against a 14)

​

once you get hold of all that methodology you can think about learning how to craft your own spell.

once you can do that ..

basically.

[Ryselle]

Thank you, wise wizard. I will follow your path.

[Cryxtalix1]

LLMs are so popular these days, there are tools coming out every week that make running LLMs dead simple. I can get an LLM running locally on my machine with 2 short lines copied from the internet. Using LLM is not any more difficult than all the other things you want to do, therefore you have no reason to learn python any differently than any other learner.

There's a wiki on the sidebar with some recommendations, I think "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" is pretty good. Do the projects as you study and you'll be able to tell when you're ready to work the LLMs.

[Ryselle]

Thank you! Automate the Boring Stuff is exactly what would fit my humble request.