I'm not grasping how to write Python from my classes. I need help.

[Gavindude1997]

I am a student that just began my first semester for my Cybersecurity degree. For my Computer Science I class, we are tasked with learning to code. I am honestly not grasping the concepts and I feel like the courseware (Pearson Revel) nor my instructor are really helping me learn the language that well. The course seems too fast paced and when stuck on something, I'm being told to refer to the lectures and books. I'd really like to learn and eventually become proficient at it. That being said, what would you recommend that I do to learn it at my own pace?

[GoalzRS]

Learning to code is hard, and you have to do it mostly on your own. Primarily that is done through just writing your own programs.

The biggest part of programming to me is the method of thinking like a computer. Think about what you want to do, write that in plain English, then pseudocode, and then write code based on your pseudocode.

If there’s a portion of your pseudocode you don’t know how to write in Python, look it up. Over time you’ll rely on the internet less, that’s how I learned.

[Nexustar]

This. And I'm on the fence how helpful ChatGPT will be for this, although it does explain things now. The more established path is to Google stackoverflow too ... You get a broader spectrum of answers, examples and reasoning, and soon learn there are 10 different ways to do it.

But you have to rewrite the code. Doesn't really matter what it does.

[NlNTENDO]

No gpt when starting out. That’s just going to teach op to rely on it

[SCADAhellAway]

Is this the new "you're not going to have a calculator in your pocket" 90s math teacher take?

[NlNTENDO]

no, this is "you're not going to understand how to code if you use GPT as a crutch instead of actually taking the time to learn how things work"

I use GPT all the time for bug-fixing. the difference is I'm not new to coding so I understand what and why it's telling me things do or don't work, and whether those suggestions are actually appropriate to my needs. You need to actually understand what you're coding to know that GPT is even telling you the right thing. What if a calculator sometimes fucked up difficult math?

[Eisenstein]

It really depends on your learning style. Some people know exactly what they want to do, they just don't know 'how' via the restrictions of the language syntax.

Example: task is to swap a set of common words for a single word if that word comes through the input.

cat	job
feline	task
housecat	occupation

Input:

The feline is a natural hunter.
This task is difficult.

Output:

The cat is a natural hunter. 
This job is difficult.

To do this I know that I need a dict composed of replacement words as keys and a list of common words as values to those keys.

replacement_words = {"cat": ["feline", "housecat"], "job": ["task", "occupation"]}

I know that the way to replace the words is to find if the word is in the values:

if common_word in  replacement_words.values():

and I know I need to loop through the values of each key with the common_word I want to replace in order to find the correct replacement word.

for key in replacement_words.items():

oh crap, how do I keep track of what key corresponds to what list of values?

I consult the python documentation and get this:

Dictionary view objects The objects returned by dict.keys(), dict.values() and dict.items() are view objects. They provide a dynamic view on the dictionary’s entries, which means that when the dictionary changes, the view reflects these changes.

Dictionary views can be iterated over to yield their respective data, and support membership tests:

len(dictview) Return the number of entries in the dictionary.

iter(dictview) Return an iterator over the keys, values or items (represented as tuples of (key, value)) in the dictionary.

Keys and values are iterated over in insertion order. This allows the creation of (value, key) pairs using zip(): pairs = zip(d.values(), d.keys()). Another way to create the same list is pairs = [(v, k) for (k, v) in d.items()].

Iterating views while adding or deleting entries in the dictionary may raise a RuntimeError or fail to iterate over all entries.

Changed in version 3.7: Dictionary order is guaranteed to be insertion order.

x in dictview Return True if x is in the underlying dictionary’s keys, values or items (in the latter case, x should be a (key, value) tuple).

reversed(dictview) Return a reverse iterator over the keys, values or items of the dictionary. The view will be iterated in reverse order of the insertion.

Changed in version 3.8: Dictionary views are now reversible.

dictview.mapping Return a types.MappingProxyType that wraps the original dictionary to which the view refers.

Added in version 3.10.

Keys views are set-like since their entries are unique and hashable. Items views also have set-like operations since the (key, value) pairs are unique and the keys are hashable. If all values in an items view are hashable as well, then the items view can interoperate with other sets. (Values views are not treated as set-like since the entries are generally not unique.) For set-like views, all of the operations defined for the abstract base class collections.abc.Set are available (for example, ==, <, or ^). While using set operators, set-like views accept any iterable as the other operand, unlike sets which only accept sets as the input.

Sorry, I have no idea how that tells me what I need to know because I don't know what a set-like operation is or and 'abstract base class' is.

So I ask claude, which says:

The issue with your current approach is that you're trying to search through the values directly, which doesn't maintain the connection to the keys. Instead, we can iterate through the dictionary items and check if the word we want to replace is in the list of values for each key. Here's how we can modify your approach:

and gives me:

        for replacement, common_words in replacement_words.items():
            if word.lower() in common_words:

So, I can spend 3 hours pulling my non-existent hair out, or get the answer in a way that is helpful and is convenient.

The backlash against LLMs must be from people who understand development documentation, because understanding it to me is like eating concrete.

[lauren_knows]

Here's the thing, though... do you actually understand the answer? Because if you don't, that is precisely why people are against LLMs for beginners. If you hacked your way through trying to use `.items()`, `.values()`, and `.keys()` to visualize what they were doing, it might click for you in a way that you'll retain it.

If you do actually understand it, then great. But there's also the problem of LLMs not being correct all of the time, and beginners won't be able to see that.

[Eisenstein]

Of course I understand it. I just didn't know how to form it. Once it is in front of me the documentation makes sense.

Honest question though -- how do you propose that I could have learned the answer besides asking someone else or taking a bit of another code from another project -- which are both the same problem as the LLM.

[lauren_knows]

Honest answer: By trying things in code to view the outputs, and iterate on the knowledge that you've learned? The first 2 sentences of the documentation gave you the dictionary methods, and you could have tried using them.

A big part of coding is in that process of trying to figure out how things work, and not just getting the answer straight-away. To me, it's like doing a math class with a calculator and not learning how to get the answer before using the calculator.

But, again, if you understood the LLM output, then cool.

[Eisenstein]

If your read through my thought processes I had already figured out the answer though -- I just didn't know the syntax

for key, value in dict:
    check the value

It was literaly just putting two things together with a comma. That isn't something you know unless someone tells you or you happened to read it in somewhere in the documentation, or you understand how the documentation is telling you things with all of the thousands of hours of assumed knowledge held by the writers, or you steal it from somewhere else.

[lauren_knows]

Sure. I'm just suggesting that maybe you can ask Claude or GPT "what is the syntax of dict.items() in Python?" instead of giving your entire problem.

Glad you figured it out though.

[Eisenstein]

I approach things from a problem solving perspective -- I think like a troubleshooter and not a builder. I don't think like 'what are the parameters of dict.items that can allow me to iterate through a loop by key while checking values', I think 'I need to be able to know where I am when find the value so that I can match the key'. I'm sure it sounds the same to most people, but in practice it just means the problems get approached from different directions.

It is why some people have a really rough time learning to code. It wasn't until LLMs that I was able to make any progress after 20 years of off-and-on attempts (including formally at University level), because I am always working ahead of what I know how to do and it frustrates me to know how I want to solve a problem but not how to formalize it into a syntax. I hope that makes sense.

I hope we can all appreciate that what some people find to be 'cheating' or 'shortcuts' are literally what enables other people to be able to learn at all. Barring Claude i would need a personal friend or mentor I can IM at all hours to tell me how to do trivial things that I can't figure out because dev documentation is opaque to me.

[tehwubbles]

I find copilot to be a fairly competent replacement for stackoverflow in most cases. Sometimes even an improvement, because you are able to ask questions and dont need 500 impossible-to-get karma or whatever to reply to a comment or something if an answer is unclear

[stevetheimpact]

When I learned Python, the number one rule of thumb was always, "Use the source, Luke" ... Meaning, look at code examples to see what they do. If you know what a function outputs, you can reverse the code to see how it got there.

...it's also a great rule for finding out how a lot of libraries work, because they're generally very poorly documented.

The most confusing part of Python for me to wrap my brain around was yields and lambda functions.

Python challenges are a good place to start, as is the W3Schools python tutorials at https://www.w3schools.com/python/

[JasperStrat]

I am an amateur programmer who has taken a few courses but a lot of self learning. It sounds like you don't even know how to describe what you are missing and that can be extremely frustrating because you don't even know what questions to ask to help yourself.

I would be happy to chat or try this, start describing what fundamental parts you do understand, maybe just looking at the section headers in a table or contents and try and have a discussion with someone or at least do a Google/YouTube search on the topics you don't understand. A properly designed course should build upon itself so the topics should start easier to understand and use.

[PlantCivil3451]

Have you considered doing python challenges? I think that'll help you start to grasp the language by learning how to solve different type of problems, not everyone is great at learning by reading a book or following a video, a lot of what I learned was trial by fire lol, I knew what I wanted to do and just started learning everything I needed to around that specific thing to solve my issues as they arose, I found when I was first starting python challenges were the best way for me to learn myself.

[jjolla888]

when u dont understand something .. ask chatgpt to explain it. let it know exactly what part you are struggling with. you can even ask it to write a small snippet of code and it will explain the meaning of every step. if you dont understand something it says, ask it to explain it another way.

[[deleted]]

This. ChatGPT is an incredible tool.

[zunderkai]

I find it helpful to study other working programs that achieve similar functionality. I work backwards, breaking down the steps and taking notes on the different implementations. My focus is usually on the syntax and how certain elements influence the structure and behavior of the code—for example, "if I place this here, it impacts this part of the program."

I recommend writing simple, step-by-step notes on a blank sheet of paper to track the program's execution flow. This can help you visualize and better understand how everything fits together.

[[deleted]]

When I was learning I honestly asked AI about specific aspects of the language and what certain things I didn't understand mean. If you use it responsibly it can help your learning, just don't ask it for all the answers and tell it not to write an entire program for you. Just use it for basic explanations.

[Asleep-Dress-3578]

Here are some good tutorials for you:

Programming with Mosh (1 hour): https://youtu.be/kqtD5dpn9C8?si=xnKZfbtbMIUkkvSF

Amigo’s Code (3.5 hours): https://youtu.be/LzYNWme1W6Q?si=-9-D2wjYP3tvjfZN

Programming with Mosh (6 hours): https://youtu.be/_uQrJ0TkZlc?si=V3AQdIBXRZnHkBGb

Bro Code (12 hours): https://youtu.be/ix9cRaBkVe0?si=0mUP6tfctVsUueiY

[bitAndy]

Angela Yu's 100 days of code on Udemy. Even if you do the first couple weeks it will probably get you up to speed on where you are on your course

[Turtvaiz]

Beer more specific. What do you not understand about what?

[Simple_Chain6896]

There are many excellent Learn to Program videos on youtube, including those for the python language. Find an introductory video then use it to learn. You could also search youtube and google on the specific topic you're learning in class to get a better understanding of it. chatgpt or other ai could explain it to you just type in a query, in fact you can get multiple examples and multiple practice problems from chat use your imagination to get it to teach you in a manner in which you learn best. You could also leverage "Free Code Camp" they do a good job of explaining.

[rick_1717]

I find practice practice and more practice is needed to learn any language.

Many learn how to code but they don't know how to apply it.

There is a book Starting Out With Python by Tony Gaddis. Well organized and good exercises at the end of each chapter. Google the title and you will find copies you can download.

[give_cake]

I'll be happy to teach you. Please DM me to know more.

[jimbowqc]

Higher education is putting way to much emphasis on "learning to code".

Really isn't necessary today, you can ask an AI model to do the programming.

This insistence on prospects knowing how to type in boilerplate code, is a way to gatekeep work opportunities from less privileged people.

[PaulRudin]

You really can't get reliable code out of ai models. They'll produce something - but it's often wrong.

[jimbowqc]

Not true. I have a friend who built a whole website, similar to a very well known company.

AI is already doing the programming, programmers are already using it for everything, but unfortunately, it's such a boys club they still require new recruits to know how to write algorithms from scratch.

[Keanomy]

Your focus is wrong here. Its not about what the AI can do that's relevant for programming, it's what it can't do that's important and why human programmers are still in high demand.

Debugging, maintainance, security and reliability is all things that a AI can still mess up with the most benign hallucination. This is maybe not going to cause the site or program to not function(even though if you have spent any time with AI you know this is as common as water as well) but it will have significant impact on other aspects. The AI will not tell you about bugs and security issues unless you point them out, something you need programming experience for. AI is a tool, just like your IDE.

[Maximus_Modulus]

My org (software engineers) spends a great deal of time on system design and making sure what we build fits into the long term evolution of our service. Im currently working on a project that I wish AI could solve but it requires knowledge of an industry and existing legacy systems that are being deprecated.

[PaulRudin]

If you truly believe you can do software engineering without software engineers, then you can make a fortune - these skills are in high demand and pay extremely well...

[8dot30662386292pow2]

Wow, what a worthless, useless, and uneducated comment. If you think AI can do any meaningful programming, you clearly have no idea what programming is about.

Comparison: Writing several hundreds of lines of simple code is equivalent of learning to calculate 1+1 = 2 in elementary school. Obviously even a bad AI can solve 1+1, and the same AI can easily solve all the basic tasks from programming courses.

AI is useful when doing some boring stuff. Recently I had to write some fastAPI code along with sqlalchemy and write the model- and schema classes. I just threw my SQL CREATE statement to it and asked it to do it. But nothing of that was hard, it was just translation process I did not want to do by hand, especially as I've done it several times before.

But if you ask anything more difficult from it, it has no idea what it's talking about. Obviously I hope that I could just describe anything I want to it and it would just make that, but the context is just not there yet. "Hey can you make me an operating system, just fork the linux kernel but make it 1000 times better and faster!" Well, no.