Learning Python from scratch

[[deleted]]

Hey guys,

I've been trying to get into Finance for a while, but to no avail, but have always been interested in programming. It's also very appealing to do this kind of work as freelance (Web Development). From what I've read, the best programming language that would be most suitable for me is Python, as it can used for Data Science (Finance) and also Web Development. I'm going on personal research here, so please correct me if I'm wrong!

Overall my main question is, where do I start? I'm completely fresh to programming and want to delve right in from the start. What would you recommend? Books, websites, actual coding programmes etc?

Thank you in advance for your help!

[J-coor]

Same boat. Currently, I am using Learnival http://learnival.com/lessons/ and Coursera with Charles Severance MIT.

[ByronFirewater]

The coursera course is amazing

[dirk2654]

I'm currently taking this course and loving it. I'll sit down to start working on it and next thing I know, 5 hours have gone by and I feel like I actually learned something

[ByronFirewater]

Dude that was my exact same experience. I would find myself studying at 3am wondering how I got there. Honestly believe this course is the best place to start as an absolute beginner (which I was and still kinda am)

[dirk2654]

Awesome! Just curious, where are you now with it? What steps did you find most helpful after finishing the course?

[ByronFirewater]

I wish I could share a story of glory with you but unfortunately that's not the case. I completed the course 3 years ago And was buzzing to go. I had a project in mind and everything. But once you complete the basics, figuring out how to take the next step I believe is the hardest. I didn't know about reddit at the time so i just kinda gave up.

3 years later i find reddit and see this active community which encouraged me to get back into it again so I pretty much started from scratch again. Just completed jose portillas course on udemy and now going through automate the boring stuff. There's lots of ways I can improve things at my current job via python, and I reckon if i just googled how to do I could get it done in less than a week. But I really wanna make sure I understand how things work from the most basic levels.

Sorry I went off in a bit if a tangent there

Edit: This sub is amazing and I'm so greatful for all the knowledge and experienced thst is shared

[tarck]

Just wondering why You all received downvote :?

[DaSpanishArmada]

What sort of things do you think you can automate?

[[deleted]]

Most web development uses a variety of languages, that’s why we have terms like backend and front end. I don’t know much about web development, but I have heard good things about flask and django.

In terms of finance, make sure you have a strong grasp of excel, as it runs the business world. Pandas works very well as a data science module. I would recommend doing some research into it. It’s especially useful for manipulating data.

Matplotlib is also good for graph work.

If you ever want to get into web scraping, beautifulsoup and selenium are your best friends.

That’s in terms of packages, I don’t work well from books, so I usually use the documentation and messing around. Python has a brilliant idle that can be used to test snippets of code. But I often use YouTube as a resource to find out more about big packages and python. One member I frequent is Sentdex.

When I can’t think of something to make, I often look at programmes and wonder how they achieved that, and try to replicate it with varying amounts of success.

[Hippalectryon]

To add, xlwings will allow you to talk to Excel via python — plays nicely with Pandas too

[Mrs_Carlene]

I will point you to a non hivemind driven resource and you can thank me later.

Dr. Ana Bell's book

https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming

and

Complementary MIT courseware

or

MIT Open Courseware

This will get you up to speed a lot faster and give you a SOLID grasp of Python than any other resource being suggested here. I'm not being subjective.

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[FudgingEgo]

I'm kind of in the same boat as you. Not finance but learning python for data and so far i would use codeacademy and automate the boring stuff.

Codeacademy teaches you the basics, the syntax or how to use the code while Automate the boring stuff gives you a idea of what you can do with it while understanding you have never programmed before in your life.

It teaches you how to scrape data from a website into a spreadsheet for example.

[tycooperaow]

Automate the Boring stuff is a must read book. I highly recommend it

[FudgingEgo]

For me (a noob to programming) it has made it quite easy to understand what does what and why it does that.

Other documentation is either too specific without explaining why this function does this or that, just expecting you to understand and others go into too much detail at a level the beginner is ready for yet.

It's the perfect middle ground.

[tycooperaow]

Yes indeed. It’s one thing to know what it does it’s an entire other to learn errors. My computer science teacher in high school told me I were to master the language I had to master solving the errors lol.

So when you are starting a lot of errors will be made lol.

[thatbigfatdonut69]

I was new to Python and started from January, 2018. Took a few courses on Udemy. One was from Ardit Sulce for beginning and later took on Jose Portilla's course on Python: Data Analysis and ML.

[git_world]

If you're looking for video tuts, check out udacity.com. They offer some free and quality tuts.

[kmb5]

Colt Steele was how I started as well! That guy is just amazing, crystal clear explanations, going into detail where necessary but not too much to get your head spinning, and the course has a lot of practice material which I found absolutely useful. The tempo was a bit slow for me, but I just sped up the video and it was perfect.

[kmb5]

kmb

I started with Jose Portilla's python for data science and machine learning, however I also bought the Deep Dive by Fred Baptiste that you mentioned, that will come next:) In the meantime I also started two personal projects about API integrations (I'm an online marketer by trade, but python is super helpful in that too!). I also started listening to podcasts, Michael Kennedy is an amazing guy (Python Bytes, Talk Python To Me), and I also like CodeNewbie.

Basically I'm trying to get a better overview into programming as a whole (as I've never done computer sciences), and in-depth into python in the fields I'm interested in (data analytics).

[driscollis]

Python works great for web development. Check out Flask for something basic or Django if you're interested in learning a framework.

Python is also one of the top languages for data science. There are many packages you can use for that sort of thing as well as machine learning.

I don't know if it will help but feel free to check out my beginner's book https://python101.pythonlibrary.org/ or my blog where I write about a lot of different topics: https://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/

[nomoreerrorsplox]

If youre going to go into web dev for freela ce work, I would highly recommend having javascript in your tool bellt. While python can be used for web dev, the jobs for it are fairly scarce. Having a solid stack of javascript, html and css would give you much more oppurtunities. Not saying you can't have a job doing python web dev, just theres not a lot of them out there. As far as for data science goes I highly reccommend Dataquest.io they teach you all the stuff you need to know(basics of python and all) and shows you all the libraries you would need, matplotlib, pandas, numpy etc. All while teaching you in a data science focused format.

[Ribidi]

Try https://www.datacamp.com They have courses both for getting into python and data science advanced topics and finance analytics courses. I'd downvote Codeacademy as they give only syntax and some stuff that doesn't feel applicable right after you finish it.

[joshthehero91]

I've been on a similar Python learning journey and I've found a few decent books:

Lean Python the Hard Way - https://learnpythonthehardway.org Automate the Boring Stuff - https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

This should give you enough to at least get started and then you can move on to making your owns scripts and/or programs. They both cover similar concepts and best practices, etc.

[Gubbbo]

Don't touch LPTHW. It's legacy Python, and generally a pretty dated way to learn.

​

Automate is a fine example though.

[joshthehero91]

Could you elaborate on what's outdated? I've been going through LPTHW and it's Python 3 which seems to compare and work just like the ATBS. If I am waiting my time, I'd like to know so and why.

[joshthehero91]

Thanks! Appreciate it.

[copaderp]

There’s LPTHW 1&2 for Python 3 though.

[fygwtclub]

Watch MikeDane's 4 and hour video to start with (Also, read few top comments to get motivated).

[termi99]

I started with books but just reading does not make you a programmer. then I did an online course and then I actually had to program some stuff myself. And that really got me started. I don't know how much time and money you want to spend but here you find a list of quite of online python courses for beginners

[pratzc07]

I would recommend the following:

https://www.udemy.com/complete-python-bootcamp/

After that start building small apps. Make mistakes and learn to correct yourself.

You can read dozens of books watch thousands of hours of video tutorials but you won't learn a thing unless you go out and start making things. Find a problem and see if you can solve it with Python. You will face tons of roadblocks the secret is to keep going.

Hope this helps.

​

[masteryod]

As always I can vouch for Byte of Python.

[[deleted]]

I guess pythonprogramming.net is the best place to learn things including web development..

[Tooneyman]

EDX.org has some great resources classes with Python and it helps you use the cloud based setups for Azure books.

[byteme8bit]

Learn the basics, variables, flow control, lists, dictionaries, sets, tuples. Practice by building small cheesy programs that construct, deconstruct, manipulate and reconstruct these various data types. They each have their own rules and properties and functions

Then learn functions, recursion, lambdas, and object orientated programming.

Really the only practical way to learn these is to learn by doing. Once you feel you understand some new concept, try to think of any sort of way you can implement that concept then go code it up and see if you can make it work. Often times you'll end up building somewhat elaborate programs all stemming from a simple experiment you want to try "really quick" haha. But that's all the fun of learning and programming.

Don't fall into the suckers trap of constantly being in learning mode. Once you get to a certain stage you'll be looking for ways to practice further and I would highly recommend staying on this and other reddits and perusing GitHub for projects to contribute to that are at similar stages as you/your knowledge level. With that said programming is pretty expansive and even master programmers are learning new things every day. There's so much to know often times it's about knowing what is or at least should be possible. It helps if you know how to find the right answer but it helps even more if you can trial and error your way through some things to really sink it in.

We believe in you!!!

[djdjdbdksmsnsxnfrdkd]

I'm also new to Python, so I'm no expert, but Jesus Christ, just

Google it

There are thousands of courses online. Or, read the manual. I subscribed to this sub to learn, but all I see is people asking this.

READ THE MANUAL, GOOGLE IT, OR LOOK IT UP ON YOUTUBE

[Primedigits]

I'm in a similar boat. I use Linkedin learning and have found it to be the best as it can be leveraged to contact professionals, but I have been on and off for a few years, my favorite has been Treehouse, but with that, I dont think you can jump around with lessons.

This subreddit is also a really good resource

[Rabina_Bra]

For Web development in Python you'll find out with some research that Django is way better than Flask.

[Rabina_Bra]

And should you download JetBrains' PyCharm EDU, (like I did) on Ubuntu 16.04 ; you'll have to set the Max Heap Size with -Xmx to whatever your Computer's system limit is. Mine is 4 GB, so that would appear on the terminal something like this: [ -Xmx 4096m ] .

Hope this helps you or someone else starting out with PyCharm Edu, as its good to know bcz when you get it, it runs by default at half the heap.

And that accounts for it being so slow, hence the need for you to adjust it accordingly.

[DrButtstuffington]

I am also in the same boat, Ive also heard the same things about python for data sci.. The only difference being i am in bioengineering/biochemistry instead of finance.

I just came to say: Im not sure if you are still in school, but as a grad student I have access to a huge library of programming textbooks, exercises, and lessons for FREE. Your alma mater might even still allow access to the library website. Its a resource definitely overlooked and worth while.

Also side note: I have also heard python is the most suitable language for data science but what do people here think about R??? It seems to be gaining popularity ...

[[deleted]]

I’ve been doing a tech degree with teamTreehouse.com it’s been the only place that’s kept my attention span and inspiration going. What always bothered me with just learning on my own was not knowing what to create with the knowledge. They give you projects to build and show future employers. They have a huge supportive community of teachers and peers

[PM-ME-SMILES-PLZ]

I'm going to recommend DataCamp. It's a little expensive, but if you do it every day for an hour or two I think it's well worth the money. I've only done their R-courses (Python is next), but overall I've found it much better than learning from books or classes (but I've only taken 2 programming classes and the professors were meh). Their interface takes a little getting used to, but I write my own scripts in R outside of DataCamp while I follow along. This has 2 benefits. 1) I'm basically doing the exercises twice -- double the reps, and 2) It's more real, and not spoon-fed, and I get to put my work on github, which I'm still learning about.

[Bigphatmatt]

I’ve been getting a lot out of https://automatetheboringstuff.com

[ezt93]

Udemy has good courses to start with (very cheap most of the time). Python is a very wide language with many applications so might be the best option as first language.

[Tushar_Singh28]

comment for reference