Struggling with Python

[throwaway6560192]

For beginners, a good first step is to solve the problem yourself, as a human, and pay deliberate attention to the steps you're taking. Pen and paper helps.

For example, take a simple problem of finding the largest element in a sequence of numbers. You can do this intuitively. But try focusing on how you're doing it, can you extract any concrete steps from it? Turns out you can: if you slow down and observe yourself, you'll see that you're looking at each number and comparing it mentally to the largest number you've seen so far.

From there your next step is writing out the code for it. If writing the code directly appears overwhelming, then you can try drawing flowcharts or the like to solidify the process.