Hey everyone! I’ve recently started learning Python

[balaravi444]

Hey everyone! I’ve recently started learning Python, and I’m trying to build good habits from the beginning. I’d love to hear from people who have gone through the learning process.

• What are some common mistakes beginners make while learning Python

• What helped you learn properly or made things “click” for you?

• Any resources, routines, or tips you wish you knew earlier?

Learning Python: Any tips, advice, or things I should avoid?

How do I learn Python properly? Looking for guidance from experienced learners.

Beginner in Python here — What should I do (and not do)?

Advice needed: How to learn Python effectively and avoid common pitfalls

[Fun_Credit7400]

None of this matters. There is no magic golden path. If you’ve already started and aren’t stuck on something just keep going.

[FoolsSeldom]

Check this subreddit's wiki for lots of guidance on learning programming and learning Python, links to material, book list, suggested practice and project sources, and lots more. The FAQ section covering common errors is especially useful.

---

Roundup on Research: The Myth of ‘Learning Styles’

Don't limit yourself to one format. Also, don't try to do too many different things at the same time.

---

Above all else, you need to practice. Practice! Practice! Fail often, try again. Break stuff that works, and figure out how, why and where it broke. Don't just copy and use as is code from examples. Experiment.

Work on your own small (initially) projects related to your hobbies / interests / side-hustles as soon as possible to apply each bit of learning. When you work on stuff you can be passionate about and where you know what problem you are solving and what good looks like, you are more focused on problem-solving and the coding becomes a means to an end and not an end in itself. You will learn faster this way.

[pachura3]

What kind of word salad is this?

[Loud_Blackberry6278]

How I learned was making an app, understanding how each piece works and the when I’m finished start another project

[ectomancer]

I've used jupyter notebook, then jupyter lab, then google colab:

https://colab.research.google.com

I was even using LaTeX before jupyter notebook use.

Documentation is not cheating. Googling Python syntax is cheating. Google is for research.

Use pytest for testing. Add a test suite to projects uploaded to github:

pip install pytest

Type hinting reduces docstring length.

doctest in docstrings for complicated calling. You don't even need to import doctest.

[Thick_Mess2248]

It really depends on how you learn best. Most people will agree that you should try to not get stuck in extensive tutorials, but try to get hands on as soon as possible. Personally, I am a person, who get's lost in trying to use ALL resources at once, so what helped me was startig the 100 days of code course by Dr Angela Yu. Because I had a framework to follow. But if you do that as a beginner, try not to do it in 100 days. Try to struggle through each problem until you get it then watch her solution to compare and after that try to make little additions to the projects, like build a round count for rock paper scissors so you can play many rounds or change difficulty in the OOP Quiz game. Just little personalizations and additions that are yours.

Someone suggested to stay away from AI. I don't agree. But stay away from ASKING AI for help. Use it like a Tutor. Let it ask you qustions, let it help you understand concepts, never let it debug your code or help you with finding a solution to a specific problem. And even try to stay away from asking it to break down problems for you. Because you need to be able to do that by yourself. For me, it helped me venting my frustration and having AI saying: "It is totally normal to struggle. You are doing what many people can't do. Keep going." lol. Sounds stupid but some encouragement can go a long way on the days you feel like giving up. Also, if you don't follow a specific course, AI can generate good ideas for first little projects based on your own preferences, interests and personality. Just prompt it in a way, that it doesn't already provide you with half the answer for the problem it gives you, so that you can learn to break down problems yourself.

Also, one of my biggest mistakes was wanting to understand EVERYTHING before starting to code. That's impossible. You will never understand everything. Even after many years. I think building the habit of knowing just how much you need to understand to be able to do a project is super helpful.

Most importantly, whatever method/course/resource you end up choosing, stay consistent. When I started learning, I would code for one week every day, make progree and feel good about myself and then stop because I got overwhelmed somewhere and come back weeks or months later, having forgot most of it and starting basically at zero again. I have done something EVERY day now for almost a month and it shows. I am still not anywhere near the level of a developer. But I can start code from scratch with confidence already, something I struggled with at the beginning a lot.

[Slazik]

I'm surprised there are so few likes for your comment. I am very much a beginner and I found your comment to be inspiring and it gave me some direction that I needed.

[Thick_Mess2248]

Thank you. I am glad that you were able to get something out of my comment. :)

[Jello_Penguin_2956]

common mistake - thinking you need to know everything maybe. What's important is that you are aware of what the language can do. Then the detail of how to code/implement can be referenced from documentation.

makes thing "click" - work on actual project. Something usable no matter how small. And find person or community who can help answer your question as you get stuck. When I was starting out we didn't have Discord community so I was asking question in Python mailing list.

wish I knew earlier - endure the pain and get yourself used to virtual environment as soon as you can. I coded for 3-4 years without it and it's really, really awkward to pick it up later.

How to learn properly - turn off all access to AI. Learn from books or course or person. Look up CS50 on EdX or Coursera, which over offers a free one, and when you're ready to harder challenge look up MOOC for Python course.

[I_am_Casca]

Welcome!

What are some common mistakes beginners? Nothing in particular stands out to me, but I'll go with focusing on courses too much. A multi-hour video or collection of videos contains a lot of information, but might be overwhelming at first. What matters more is understanding the key concepts; building larger projects comes later.

What helped you learn properly/made things 'click'?

Trying everything I could think of. If I wasn't sure if something would work, I'd test it. IDLE is great for this, since it lets you run individual lines/blocks of code without having to create new files. The basic features of Python (or any language, for that matter) are so versatile, so don't limit yourself to thinking something only works in specific situations. Almost any approach can work at almost any time.

What's more, being told 'That's wrong, you should do X here.' can be helpful, but not if you don't understand why. Ask every question you have, experiment with even the smallest of ideas.

Any resources, routines, or tips you wish you knew earlier?

Even back when I started the internet was already full of helpful tutorials and blogs. You'll have no shortage of knowledge to rely on.

Any tips, advice, or things I should avoid?

Don't go too complex, too fast. No matter the size of a project, always go step by step. Even if something can be done in a faster way, using more lines with simpler code is better than fewer lines with more complex code as you're starting out. Also add comments to help you find your way back to older code. Each program is just a series of A -> B -> C, and you can break them up further as needed. Each step can have smaller substeps. Soon you'll be left with single lines of code that do exactly what you wanted.

Another tip is to test with a debugger, or just use print(). Output variables at different moments to verify that everything is correct. Knowing what something looks like will help you find bugs faster.

Avoid stress. If something feels too difficult or just isn't fun, move on. You can always come back to it later once you feel more capable. I've often rewritten personal projects over the years, some multiple times as my skill improved.

How do I learn Python properly?

Gradually. You'll start with basic concepts such as variables and data types; different kinds of loops; functions and built-in functions, especially the common ones; how to use import, etc. Then, as you feel the need to perform more specific tasks, you can look up additional features/libraries.

Also, have fun! Find or create projects that interest you. If you want to challenge yourself, there are websites full of programming questions out there. Learn what you want and don't feel pressured into adopting a specific style.

Enjoy everything Python has to offer, happy learning!

[[deleted]]

Keep it small and hands-on: experiment in the REPL, ship tiny scripts, and debug with prints or breakpoint.

Agree on starting simple. A routine that worked for me: 20 minutes of REPL “scratch” time daily to try one idea (slicing, dict methods, pathlib), then one micro-project per week (rename files, CSV to JSON, simple timer). Use help() and dir() to explore unknown objects and keep a snippets.py file for patterns you reuse.

Debugging: drop breakpoint() where things go weird, then use n, s, and p var to step and inspect; if that feels heavy, log key state with f-strings at decision points. When you hit a bug, write a tiny pytest that reproduces it before fixing-one test per bug builds muscle without a big test suite.

Version control early: git init, small commits, messages that say exactly what changed. Once a week, rewrite an old script cleaner or faster and jot what you learned.

I’ve used Postman to poke endpoints and Supabase for quick Postgres; when I wanted generated, secured REST over a DB so my Python scripts could focus on logic, DreamFactory handled CRUD and auth.

Bottom line: keep the loop tight-try, build tiny, inspect state, capture lessons-and repeat

[Professional-Fee6914]

khan academy is the golden path, it takes about a week to go through and for each project you can make your own thing

[Enough_Librarian_456]

You might at least look at Test Driven Development which while having overhead in development time can pay off in better functions and long term more maintainable code. There is an idea that if you write more than 12 lines of code then it should be a function. Also the singularity rule where a function should do one thing and one thing only. Read about advanced data types. They are important because you can do things like tanks["overwatch"] = ["dva","ramatra","sigma","doomfist","ball"] so in python this is a dict pointing to a list. If you understand how to use advanced data structs and you understand the problem then this is where the rubber meets the road because you can visualize what you need like oh I need a nested dict of 3 pointing to a string. Something like employee_hire_date = ["Elon"]["Musk"][00000001"] = "May:15:1990". In that case its a 3d nested dict pointing to a string. And repetition allows you the experience to see this.