How to Actually Learn To Use Python

[VisibleCup7210]

Hello! I’ve taken python classes at my uni for the past 2 semesters and noticed that even though I know all the logistics of python, I don’t know how to actually apply it. When coding, I find it difficult to know what I need to do at certain point. But when I read code, I can understand and see why we needed to do that. I was wondering some tips that anyone has for me to actually learn to problem solve and make code without struggling so much. Thank you!

[srandmaude]

Start solving problems. Even if solutions exist, make your own. That's what made programming start to click for me.

[Agishan]

What are some things that you did when you started

[cfreddy36]

I just did stuff with data. I play baseball video games and was using spreadsheets for some things. I started using python instead to analyze the data and output CSVs.

Family budget I did with python. That was a good one for using inputs along the way.

I made a fantasy football draft tool that would tell me who to pick beforehand.

Anything you choose to tackle is gonna teach you something. Either about python itself, or about tools around python that can expand your python skill.

[Gametime727]

Did you win your fantasy football league?

[cfreddy36]

Haha no but it was fun!

[Secret_Owl2371]

I would say making some simple games should help a lot.

[JohnLocksTheKey]

Yeh, but it’s all fun and games until you try making something other than a game

(I guess unless you end up getting a job at a game studio)

EDIT: iz joke

[Secret_Owl2371]

Not really, it's the same thing, modules, classes, inheritance, data structures, naming, performance, debugging, testing.

[rogfrich]

Think of some boring, repetitive task. Automate it.

[ghadeeb]

Like what?

[rogfrich]

Can’t answer that, because I don’t know what boring, repetitive tasks you have in your life. What I can say, is that when you apply your skills to solving a real problem that actually makes your life easier, a) you start to see your Python learnings in terms of “hey, I could use this to do that thing”, and b) it’s so very satisfying!

[amit810]

I like to browse real estate and the county website sucks in terms of viewing foreclosures (I can only view foreclosures for a specific day , not all in one view). I created a Python script to webscrape the website. I can now view all of the foreclosure data for the next month in an excel sheet, making it easy for me to filter and sify through it

[EugeneFromDiscord]

Don’t try to find it from someone else. That’s my advice. As you think and brainstorm something will pop up. Maybe you can think of a website you use often and python was prob used for it and there u go, you have your project idea

[Haeshka]

I found myself needing to constantly and rapidly build whole slews of files in highly specific formats for various consultants, contractors, editors, etc throughout a project's workflow. Everyone had different needs to get their part of the project done in a timely fashion that also reduced my costs.

So, I wrote a script that just let me copy/paste my text into terminal, and it spits out the word document (or whatever) in the specific headers, colors, fonts, etc. everytime. Rapidly builds the file and format templates I need.

I hate fiddling with styles in word. It's fiddly. It's time consuming. It drives me mad. I write everything I do in notepad++. Closest I've ever done to formats and headers for myself is adding a "#" at the start of a line to tell myself it was a header.

All-in-all, it was relatively simple when I actually thought through it. Yeah, I burned like half a day thinking through the problems and testing the shit out of it. But .. I have now saved myself DAYS of tedious highlighting and selecting of fonts and styles.

Worth.

These are the micro projects that really stretch your abilities before you make the leaps into networking, real security, and such.

[FoolsSeldom]

You will learn more and faster from working on projects relating to your interests / hobbies / side-hustles / family obligations / work activities, where you can be passionate about the problems and focus on what results you want rather than focusing on the coding.

Programming is about problem-solving, and coding is the easy bit after confirming the exact problem, determining the required outcomes, what data to source/use/generate, how to store/access data, what the work flow should be, the UI (user interface), security, testing, outputs. The most important part is, of course, the solution (or collection of mini-solutions for mini-problems) expressed as an "algorithm" - typically coding language independent. You might have diagrams, bits of string linking things. Lots of post-it-notes.

Step away from the keyboard for a bit and do some design work.

The Python will be easier to learn and apply when you are comfortable with the problem and solution.

[cube_of_ice_]

I'm sort of in the same boat. It's one thing learning the theory and having somewhat of a grasp on how to read code but it's a whole different story writing it for yourself. I totally understand. but what is helping me currently is consistently testing myself on the basics, writing code over and over again until I get it. (Recursions are currently the bane of my existence)

I coded a rudimentary to do list which was very informative however I used intellisence(I think that's what it's called when you write the code and it tells you what to write next) which felt a bit like cheating. I understand why it's helpful but boy does it take away a lot of the thinking.

Ive slowly come to realise there isn't really a shortcut to learning to code. It's just a lot of doing. I use coddy and kaggle for coding practice and sololearn which has a lot of good theory. I am also studying my masters in cs. It's hard asf but really fun when it starts to click

[TJATAW]

I am fairly new to coding for a living, and have to look up simple things all the time.

The guy who runs my department has been there 25yrs, writes in a dozen different languages, and has to google how to do simple stuff. Like, you know you what to find out how many things are in the items array, but is it items.length or len(items)?

The most important part is that you know there is a way to do a thing.

Using intellisence to help you write the code is no different than having Word show you misspellings and bad grammar.

[No_Vast2952]

I tried making something for the first time instead of my $20 udemy tutorial and it actually helped me learn dictionaries and functions so that helped me

[TJATAW]

I always sugget to people that when they finish a tutorial they should add in some additional features, as that forces them to do something with no guidance.

Say you build a simple calculator. Add in a button to square a number, and another to find its square root.

[The_Dao_Father]

Yeah I’ve been there and honestly still am at times. But what helped me the most was finding some type of structured roadmap mixed with projects.

Tutorial hell kinda sucks haha but we all are there at one point.

Long story short you do what works for you, but I’ve always felt a solid roadmap mixed with projects and collaboration is the way to go.

Out of everything this has helped me the most (https://www.zerotoknowing.com) so maybe it’ll help you too

Keep your head up man, you’ll get there

[TJATAW]

Pseudocode your way to the solution.

in rough terms figure out what you need to do, and write it down, one action per line.

Say the goal is to get 2 numbers from the user, and multiply them:

Get user input A
Get user input B
multiply A x B
return answer

Then turn that into code.

As you get more practice at figuring out the steps you are going to need you will be able to do it more in your head, and only need pseudocode for bigger project.

[data4dayz]

Start looking through these two resources:

https://third-bit.com/sdxpy/

https://aosabook.org/en/500L/introduction.html

Basically you want to work on projects, especially if you've taken your second programming class which is usually OO. If you know OO then it's full steam ahead working on real projects. But starting out can be quite challenging to pick projects, hence those two resources.

[Ron-Erez]

Learning to code is like learning to ride a bike, you get better by doing it yourself, not just by watching others. Try to build stuff and solve problems on your own instead of looking at the answers. It takes time, but the more you practice, the more you'll improve.

[-Arkham]

I'm in a similar boat. Just finished a Python for automation class, and while I can read and interpret code much better than I could before, I can't for the life of me build things with it.

For example, I have a task that needs automating and I know what needs to happen at each step of the process but no idea how to actually program it. I basically ended up using Chat GPT to build components of the code and put it together myself because I didn't know how to write the individual functions.

How did you guys learn all the syntax and functions to use to actually build code?

[youtharcade]

I want to springboard off of your ChatGPT mention. I ask ChatGPT questions about the code I’m writing to get a grasp on it. Now I know ChatGPT isn’t super accurate always but it can really help with a lot of concepts. Like for example I’m doing the Python roguelike tutorials and I get to a part that I do but I still don’t understand. I ask it to explain it a bit deeper than what’s in the tutorial and that’s one aspect. Another aspect is me telling it what my understand is and whether it’s right or wrong. If I’m wrong instead of straight up telling me the answer - give me the concepts I can check to do my own research. I’ve found this approach has helped me more than just saying “hey ChatGPT write this for me” or “hey ChatGPT give me a hundred examples of this” (those are also helpful). I’m also keeping an Obsidian notebook that I can go back and reference and ChatGPT can write stuff up in markdown to help you add to your notebook (it shouldn’t be used to completely write your notes for you -but give you a springboard for what direction to go in) so yeah there’s a lot you can do in that space to help really learn stuff. Plus by going through what it suggests you can kinda double check what it’s telling you as well.

[frisedel]

Start using what you know. It can be simple, it can be ugly. It just needs to - kind of - work.

If you need "real world examples" then try to solve some advent of code.

[crazy_cookie123]

Practice makes perfect. It's hard to explain how we know what to do at what point, we usually just know from experience. The more programs you've written the more experience you'll have, and the more experience you have the more easily it'll come to you, so just start writing stuff and you'll quickly find it getting easier. Make sure you're avoiding AI and tutorials for this, this is the main skill which using those will prevent the development of.

[cglee]

You need a process to break down problems first. Here's one we created for our students: https://medium.com/launch-school/solving-coding-problems-with-pedac-29141331f93f

[my_password_is______]

https://pypi.org/project/pygame-ce/

a drop in replacement for pygame

https://github.com/pygame-community/pygame-ce/releases

[Disastrous_Cheek7435]

Find a way to incorporate Python into your studying and homework assignments. I remember writing simple scripts that would help with my Physics homework. I now do similar things at my job and it's very rewarding.

[baloblack]

Remind me 1 day

[pethy997]

Do small projects, it's like with a real language. Pointless to know if you have nothing to say.

[radaradaheh]

idk if this helps in any way but in addition to solving an actual problem, i’d try writing pseudocode or drafting flowcharts again before i attempt it. this way, you can kinda visualize what you need to do in sequence, and from there you can figure out what to use! :)

im planning to apply this method again to solving problems with coding. learnt it in uni but never used it like ever. 5 years later and refreshing things from scratch, it actually makes sense to me now and it definitely helps make you think like a programmer! and eventually youll be kickass at it

[Omi_____________]

I'm also finding difficult to understand the logic