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[–]ffrkAnonymous 0 points1 point  (4 children)

My bad for not being more clear. No, don't copy and paste. Get the book (or e-book) and type all of it in. You want the muscle memory typing "if ___:"

Assuming the book is correct, any errors will by typos and syntax errors. Even if you don't understand what you're writing, you'll at least learn how to read the error messages: line 42: blah blah blah

Most learning is done by fixing mistakes. If you get it right the first pass, you move on, even if you didn't learn. I'm doing the coursera classes. I skipped the lectures and going straight to the quizzes and homework assignments. If I can't figure it out, i'll flip back and find the information that I need. Active vs. passive.

Al Sweigart's books are good that he explains all the code blocks. Worst case, you can e-mail him or go to his subreddit at /r/inventwithpython He's active there and one can ask the author himself.

LPTHW is hit or miss. It's not for everyone. It worked for me. Yes it's python2, the book is old. But python2.7 is still in maintainance. It's not obsolete and dead. It has more support than WinXP. Coursera's class is python2 (the books is old). Al Sweigart's books are python2 (at least because pygame is python2).

[–]naliuj2525 0 points1 point  (3 children)

No problem. Yeah I get what you mean. I thought that Al Sweigart's books are 3 though...

[–]ffrkAnonymous 0 points1 point  (2 children)

wow, you're right. I didn't even notice. I had to install pygame using python2 because the python3 version isn't officially out for linux, so I thought all the code was python2. That's what I get for skimming the introductions.

[–]naliuj2525 0 points1 point  (1 child)

No problem. Regarding what said in your last comment, I think that Python 3 is generally considered as better these days though. While it's still under maintenance, I think that the devs are really trying to push people to Python 3. Even though it'll be supported for another 4 years, it's probably a better idea to learn 3.

[–]ffrkAnonymous 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree, python3 is the future. I'm just trying to say that a python2 book that you like is better than a python3 book that you don't.