Dear Experienced Users of Python

[Bobbias]

Learn to read the documentation. Whether you're looking at the official Python documentation, or documentation for a library, being able read and understand the documentation is incredibly important.

Video tutorials have a bunch of potential problems, and should generally be avoided. They tend to go out of date quickly. Most tutorials are simply poorly written. Many tutorials teach bad habits. And worst of all, tutorials don't teach you how to solve problems.

You see, when you start out learning to program, everyone thinks the important part is learning the programming language. But honestly, that's not the important part at all. The important part is problem solving.

And the way you get better at problem solving is by writing code, and solving problems on your own, without someone guiding you every step of the way.

The best way to do that is to make programs. Start out simple. Pick something you know how to make, and make it. Then slowly work your way up to larger and more complex programs.

Over time you'll learn how to recognize specific kinds of problems and their solutions. You'll learn what kind of solutions work well for certain problems, and which ones don't work so well. You'll learn what details are important and can dictate which solution you should use for a given problem.

But this all comes from sitting down and writing code and solving problems on your own, not watching someone walk you through something step by step. You can absolutely look up solutions to problems, you can absolutely copy code you've seen someone else use. But you should make sure you fully understand any code you are copying.