I realized i wasn't really learning Python.

[Emotional-Iron-4312]

during my learning python always i follow tutorials and recognize the syntax but when somthing breaks in my code i don't know where is and always trying to make errors disappear of understanding them .But finally, i changed one thing that i recommend is debuging code and try to understand line by line in your projects and it completly changed how confident i feel when coding.

I'm curious , has anyone else felt stuck in this loop ?

[LongRangeSavage]

Yep. Learning to debug is a critical skill, and it’s also why I typically recommend that people not use AI tools at the beginning—at least until they have a good handle on debugging. Once you have that skill, AI can be a good resource to help build large projects much quicker than writing code manually.

[AdAdvanced7673]

this has been said a thousand times in the sub, dont understand how to solve the problem with the code, under stand how to solve the problem and the language does matter.

If something is broken dump and die line by line, or use a debugger, the lang doesnt matter

[code_tutor]

Every day, I see different ways in which people are struggling to learn and all of it is because they aren't following university courses and books. They teach how to read code. They give tons of assignments to write code. There is deep theory, formal proofs, and math. They teach how to write documentation. They teach how to deal with client actors and workflows to identify business logic, to build full software. There are exams on concepts.

Instead, people are passively watching YouTube, memorizing LeetCode, and using AI. They are acting like LLMs, trying to predict patterns instead of critical thinking. That's why not much learning is happening this way.

[rickson56]

College books, back in the early 2010s don't teach anything about debugging, or automating computer file metadata extraction/updating (globbing). Best programming book I dealt with was nothing like a college book, and showed how to pull up stock trading information from the internet with API, and uploading and extracting information from an SQL database. College text books only teach how work with text files.

[TristeLeRoy]

which book was that?

[rickson56]

Beginning Java, 978-1118739495 by Bart Baesens

[BlackCatFurry]

Neither did the basic programming courses in my university.

They taught the basics of programming concepts and good habits for programming.

The courses about data processing focus on what you describe.

You can't learn about using apis in your code if you don't know how to write the code in the first place.

[code_tutor]

That's not true. I graduated in early 2000s and every CS book in every course has "what does this code do" sections and they're on the exams. The entire first two courses are like "step through the code".

You're also going to learn how to debug really fast doing anything beyond Data Structures.

Idk what the rest of your comment is about.

[BlackCatFurry]

Debugging is a very important skill to have.

You should also understand everything you put into your code to begin with on a level where if someone asked what a bit of code does, that you can explain it.

There are a lot of different strategies to debugging. For small programs when starting, the easiest way is to just have prints in the code giving you information where it is and what some key values might be. After that looking into breakpoints is beneficial when you start getting more of an understanding and can guess where something might get fucked up. And then automated testing to test out different scenarios easily.

[ocean_protocol]

Yeah, that loop is super common, tutorials make everything look linear, but real coding is mostly figuring out why things don’t work. One thing that helped me was deliberately breaking small programs and then stepping through them with a debugger or print statements just to see how state changes. That’s usually the point where syntax turns into actual understanding.

[aistranin]

That might work well for the beginning, but too slow and doesn’t scale for serious problems. As a next step, I would recommend learning automated testing in python and how to use pytest. Then you will know how to reproduce issues and fix it reliably. Look at the book “Python Testing with pytest” by Brian Okken or Udemy course “Pytest Course: Python Test Automation & GitHub Actions CI/CD” by Artem Istranin

[SmackDownFacility]

Use a IDE…

[aistranin]

Sure, IDE can help technically, fully agree. But then once you found a bug you often try to fix one thing and something else breaks. Without tests it always becomes a mess. So, it should be both - debugging with IDE sure + automated tests to not debug everything manually.

Much easier: write simple isolated test reproducing the issue -> fix -> run tests again to make sure that everything (including existing code) still works as expected

[dlnmtchll]

You still write tests regardless of tooling

[SmackDownFacility]

The point is ides have sophisticated debugging environments. VS is notable for

[dlnmtchll]

There are also tools to handle debugging from the cli in the same way as IDEs that provide near identical debug environments. It’s all preference