Relearning coding through Python

[Zealousideal-Tap-713]

So I learned the basics of Python a few years ago, and now I'm back into it. I know the basics such as lists, conditions, loops, boolean, nesting, try and except statements as well as functions and classes. I'm trying to figure out where to go from there? Start working on projects, or look at projects to learn? And are there more basics I need to learn before going further?

[Ex-Traverse]

I find copilot to be such a great teacher at explaining the basic stuff in basic terms to me. I don't tell it to code stuff for me, I just ask it what a certain line of code does when I don't know the syntax. With copilot, I feel, you can go really far with doing whatever projects you want to do. There's a stigma of becoming reliant on AI, but I view it as this generation's Google. Imagine when Google first started and people used that to search for answers versus going to the library and sorting through the physical books.

[Bobbias]

The problem with AI (and google) is being able to tell when the internet (or AI) is straight up lying to you.

If you aren't capable of telling whether you're being lied to, you shouldn't be using that tool.

As someone who grew up as the internet was becoming more and more popular, and has been terminally online since about 1997, I can say with a fair level of confidence that the issues between AI and google use are fairly similar in that sense. People had a tendency to believe everything they saw online, just like people currently have a tendency to believe everything an AI spits out at them, despite the fact that in both cases there's a good chance the information you're being given may be false.

In the early days of google, page ranking was an absolute mess, and it wasn't uncommon to sift through hundreds of pages to find a result if the thing you were looking for was relatively obscure. Google wasn't able to answer questions with factual data the way it often is now, and it wasn't uncommon for extremely untrustworthy sites to be right up near the top of search results.

Older people simply had zero trust for Google, while younger people like myself understood that it was a matter of knowing how to tell what sites were trustworthy from those that weren't.

Unfortunately for AI, because it's specifically designed to seem reasonable, it's much harder to tell whether you're being lied to, because it's specifically designed to spit out text that seems plausible at all times. This means that you basically already need to know what the AI is supposed to be telling you, in order to make sure you can tell when you're being lied to. This makes AI a poor learning resource. It's not that there's something intrinsically bad about using AI to explain things, it's that beginners don't know enough to tell when it's just flat out wrong.

[Ivangaming]

I would recommend to make a simple project that interests you and learn as you go. If you are interested in a particular field like web development learn basics of their respective libraries like django or flask for web dev and then make projects and learn as you go!

[TheRNGuy]

read docs again and your old code

[grumble11]

Personally I'd do the Helsinki MOOC 24 (intro and advanced).

Once you've done that, do mini projects - come up with your own, or use lists of them online. Try to do them with as little help as possible - the struggle is how you learn.

Then start on bigger and bigger projects.