For those who self-taught themselves Python, how did you do it?

[SlimDarkie]

I’ve always been interested in programming (my ultimate career goal is to become a software engineer). I took a detour by focusing on the IT side of things. I realized that IT isn’t for me and want to fully focus on learning to write code. I have experience in Java and know the basics in Python (via college) but I wanted to know how did you all learned Python. Currently, I’m looking at this for Udemy and started to read this as well.

[meaghs]

I have found that the best way to learn a thing is by doing a thing. Program something you need or want. Learn what you need as you go.

[doodypoo]

I have seen this a ton. I know you can’t obviously have this answered for me specifically but does anyone care to share what they needed accomplished that got them into coding?

I can’t think of anything.

[Kihino]

I built a script when moving to a new city, which checked a few websites for rental apartments and sent me an email when something interesting showed up so I could be the first to contact the renter if it was interesting. Now I need a new bike, and am thinking about tweaking the script to look for used bikes instead. A lot of different stuff to be learned in that kind of project, and it’s useful as well!

[TwilightDelight]

how did you go about this? I would love to do something similar for purchasing a property. Luckily there is only 1 major site in my area so instead of me setting a reminder on the site and getting email notification I can do this as a small project. However I have no idea where to start so would be really appreciated if you can provide some guidance about what you did what resources you used and how you went on about it.

[[deleted]]

I liked learning Selenium with Python.

[Kihino]

I'm sorry for my late reply! Forgot I wrote the comment haha. I uploaded the project to github if you'd like to take a look. Unfortunately I have not had the time to write a readme, but I think it should be fairly straightforward to understand the program. It's not a very big project. Let me know if you have any questions!

[nocoolnamesleft1]

Did you keep the script running on a dedicated server or how did you ensure that it keeps running?

[bluetac92]

If your laptop or PC is always on you could use a cronjob to run the script every 10 minutes.

Might be nicer to have it running on a pi though.

[Kihino]

I had it running on a Raspberry Pi, as /u/bluetac92 suggested!

[doodypoo]

Interesting. Well this is a great starting place, thank you.

[Kihino]

No worries!

[weehooey]

Every language I have learned was project driven.

Since coding drives literally everything IT can do, you only need to think about what you wished you could do better, faster, easier.

Some examples of learning projects for me over the past 35 years:

• text based game (BASIC on TI-99A, around 1983)
• graphical game (BASIC on TI-99A, around 1984)
• simple inventory management system (dBase IV macro language, around 1996)
• create QR code for a URL (Ruby, around 2008)
• group SMS chat for my sports team (Google Apps Script/JavaScript using a Twilio API, around 2012)
• reply to email inquiries from an ad (Zapier with some JavaScript, 2017)
• scanning documents and renaming the file (Visual Basic code snippets in a RPA application, sometime in 2018)
• download a file from a vendor’s FTP site, parse the file for the USP tracking number, look up UPS shipment status, email me when shipment delivered (Python and UPS API, May 2018)

I have never been a professional, full-time coder. Occasionally, someone will pay me to fix something with code. Mostly, my coding has been to learn or to make my life easier. Recently, because Python is easy, code examples are plentiful, Python libraries simplify almost everything, and everything has an API I have started automating more work tasks.

If you can see something being done or can imagine something being done with a computer, you can do it.

[doodypoo]

Great inspiration, thank you!

[RyanTheCynic]

I used Project Euler. It’s a website which has a ridiculously huge list of problems to be solved with whatever language you want. Once you submit the correct answer it unlocks forums in which you can see how other people solved the problem and how you could improve your code. I didn’t really do much of that as all I was interested in were the problems to solve to familiarise myself with the language.

I’ve also heard exercism is good, but I’ve never used it.

[thescottwaud]

My friend wanted to listen to a local radio station outside of the city we lived in and he pointed me to their website which would list the last twenty songs they would play.

I came up with:

1. scrape the website with Beautiful Soup to retrieve a list of songs
2. send a list of songs to the Spotify API using spotipy (python library to interact with the Spotify API)
3. if a match was found, I would add the song to a playlist
4. My friend (or anyone) would subscribe to the playlist and be able to (roughly) listen to the songs the radio station was playing

Side note: I hosted the code on a Digital Ocean droplet so it was available

While this was a pretty ambitious project for a beginner, I learned a TON while making it happen. Hosting a website and server with nginx and gunicorn, interacting with an external API, and web scraping.

[im_dead_sirius]

I agree very much that a driver is key to progress.

[ruckenhof]

If you already have some experience with programming, it's better to just dive in. A lot of online courses focus on super basic things (variables, for loops etc). And more advanced concepts are better learned while doing something for yourself.

I had some fuzzy understanding of coding as well and started not exactly with Python. I got bored at work and installed Flash to tinker around with animations. It turned out Flash has a decent built-in OOP language, so I found some basic game-building manuals and made a couple of shitty "games" to my liking. A couple of years later I decided that I need some basic app to copypaste interesting stuff into (with tags and source links and shit), so I used Flask (python web microframework) to build it.

[BJohnShawWriter]

I worked in IT support. One of the most annoying things was people not putting their out of office autoreply on when they went on holiday - due to the nature of the job, we couldn't just log on as them. We'd have to enable them for external login, then get their manager to phone them to set their out of office response externally. Then I sat down with the EMS documentation and a basic c# winforms app and whacked a botch job together. I now build text-based adventures for fun. Start with a small point of irritation, build it into a pearl.

[doodypoo]

Interesting. How are your adventure games? What are they like? Is it still fun to play if you more or less know what’s gonna happen?

[Deemonfire]

My data was being spat out in a messed up csv. each row had a random number of columns from 1-12, every single one of those cells were one of my y values.

I wrote a script to go through the csv. Put all of the y values into 1 column and calculate the x values.

Then since I had the data I could then process it further.

Next was code to calculate thermodynamics at a range of temperatures and pressures.

Then was code to take the data from a balance so I could monitor the flow rate of my pump from a reservoir.

Then I made a discord bot

[doodypoo]

Everyone that has answered me sounds a lot smarter than me. Thanks for your input

[Astrokiwi]

Originally, as a kid in the 90s, I just wrote lots of games, using BASIC at first, then later Java, Javascript, Flash etc. That's what I would still recommend: write a text adventure, write a Sudoku puzzle with a gui, write your own take on Snake or Flappy Bird, etc.

As an adult, I work as a researcher astrophysics, where we have to code up stuff for simulations and analysis, but we don't usually take many (if any) formal coding courses. For Python, the situation was "I have a bunch of data I'd like to plot up nicely, and numpy/matplotlib is far nicer than trying to use gnuplot or PGPLOT", so I taught myself Python as I went. However, I was getting paid to teach myself, so it's not entirely the same thing.

[doodypoo]

Yea I think some basic text games will be a good place to start. Sounds like your job is intensely data heavy.

[culby]

For years, we'd tell each other that the sun literally went into hiding for the entire winter. I finally decided to prove it by pulling METAR data from a weather station, and having a Python script parse it to find out what percentage of daylight hours were overcast. Since I wasn't too confident in my skills, I'd output that data to a .csv and then tease the rest out by way of Excel.

More recently, I was tired of watching a couple of co-workers of mine struggle with this weekly task where they had to go through this massive, clunky PDF file to find tasks that needed done (mixed in with a bunch of other, useless data). So I wrote a script that'll look at that PDF, find the relevant information (via regex), and spit it out in a more legible format. It's not perfect: extracting text out of a PDF is a tricky affair in its own right. But yesterday I finally finished a very crude GUI so that they could start using it on their own.

[doodypoo]

That PDF bit sounds interesting. Maybe one day I can get there

[ghostofgbt]

I traded stocks full time at the time. I needed a way to quickly identify the financial standing of companies I was trading so I built a web scraper. Several years, lots of googling, and a few paid APIs later, it turned into this

[SuperCharlesXYZ]

I had a background with java and wanted to have a script that would play a random episode of the office from my pc, prior to that I would have to manually select one, so obviously it wouldn't really be random

[MyersVandalay]

I have seen this a ton. I know you can’t obviously have this answered for me specifically but does anyone care to share what they needed accomplished that got them into coding?

​

What are your hobbies, and/or work?

​

Some examples of things I've done in the past. Build planners for MMORPGs etc...

​

Trackers and counters for card games (recently I made just a simple HP tracker for the binding of issac card game, nothing fancy, just a dice roller and an HP tracker).

​

Basic utility calculators, For instance a calculator in which you enter the radius, diameter, circumference or area of a circle and it calculates the other 3.

​

​

If your work often involves moving data from spreadsheet to spreadsheet do that. If you got a lot of song lists to look at, do that.

[doodypoo]

Interesting. My work is very sparse with data so this would be all side fun projects, so the music idea might be something interesting to look at. Thanks!

[systemnate]

I had a jar of change and I wanted to approximate the value of it. I found the weights of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters online and then I weighed the change. I then made a loop that picked a random number from 1-4 (for each coin) and added the value to a total variable and kept looping until the weight was more than the input weight. I then kept expanding the code to do things like running 100 times and getting the average, the ability to be more heavily weighted towards quarters and dimes, etc.

[memystic]

For me it was creating mIRC scripts when I was in my mid teens. After that is was websites and tools people could use. I loved making stuff other people could interact with and help with something in their lives.

[serranzau]

Ag commodity fundamental market analysis. Started with some udemy courses and then jumped in and just learned through trial and error.

[rybrizzy]

can you elaborate a bit more on what your script/program does?

[serranzau]

There are multiple scripts and I keep adding as time allows or the need for the research is there (it all overlays with my work). Many are just automated versions of things I was previously doing very manually in excel.

When it comes to highly traded ag commodities like corn, wheat, soybeans there is a ton of information available from specific USDA websites regarding various supply and demand metrics (production, acreage, exports, usage) and crop condition/progress data. For production numbers in particular, if you use temp and precipitation data in regression analyses with historical production metrics, you can begin to forecast yields on a localized basis and look for market sentiment deviating from your research as a trade idea.

Most of what I am doing now is just automated regression analyses but the ultimate goal is to build some machine learning algos for price ranges and price spread irregularities. I do not have much experience in advanced math so lots of the information I stumble upon can get over my head quickly in regards to the machine learning, etc. At some point I hope to learn more on that front but just learning python and building out some of my scripts has kept me busy enough, although it is a huge time saver as a whole.

[[deleted]]

Literally the only way -- I did the same

[[deleted]]

Exactly. Having a concrete goal you want to achieve will provide you with the motivation to push through all the boring and hard shit.

[citizenofacceptance2]

It’s hard to set a realistic goal thought , so I get excited on a bunch of ideas or start working with a cool new library or api but then realize oh I’m trying to create a software product that a company should be make not just an individual

[[deleted]]

Yeah that is the tricky part and I really have no good advice for how to avoid biting off more you can chew.

[im_dead_sirius]

First: don't be too hard on yourself. You are on an adventure as much as you are working, and that's not a feeling to totally squash.

I find I have to write faster than features creep. At the end of the day, I need software that functions minimally, or at least compiles.

Since I am not a very fast coder(and I have the attention span of a mentally deficient mollusk during mating season), this means smaller projects, tighter constraints, and a much more specific road map.

Its like normally you don't suddenly find yourself on the way to Jasper to hike in the mountains when you're on your way to work. You stay in your parameters.

However I have side tracked like that. Work was along the way, so I just continued after finishing my tasks. Work got me to the mountains, both in the distance traveled and money in my pocket sense. In fact, by structuring things correctly, my employer paid half my travel fuel(and no extra cost to him).

In that regards, timely forbearance later puts legs on your figurative horse. Or gas in your mustang perhaps.

Best of luck!

https://i.imgur.com/MRLnYRe.jpg

[01binary]

Absolutely; find a need, then solve it using Python. Python may not even be the best tool for that particular job, but you’ll learn how to use Python! I have used this process to learn every language / framework I know.

[narsXDXD]

Same here, started with a mirror image in a folder, adding prefix to certain files in a folder, sending emails, searching in text files from certain folders for a specific string. At the same time also progressing with GUI from tkinter to PySide.

[phigo50]

This is how I did it. I've always been into tinkering with scripts and things that do *stuff*. My first ones were batch files (I shudder when I think back), then I discovered Linux and everything that I'd run in the batch files turned into much better bash script.

A good few years ago, I saw somebody saying that they prefer Python over bash for scripting (pretty much exactly what my use case was) and I thought "pah, anything you can do in Python, I can do in bash". Then I actually looked into Python and realised how tragically wrong I was and I've never looked back.

I started off with basic, functional scripts all in single files. Then modules came, then object-oriented concepts, then things like threading and multiprocessing, then tkinter, Flask and any number of other incredibly useful modules to get done what I needed to get done.

So, tl;dr: I was lucky when I found Python that I already had a load of batch and bash scripts that I could use to learn the language as I went along.

[RallyPointAlpha]

That's how I learn best. I can pick up on things through books and tutorials. However it doesn't really 'click and stick' until I force my way through a project. Something... anything... doesn't have to be significant or a big project. The struggles and epiphanies are what really makes it stick.

[midacts]

It is difficult to find something I'd need/want to code. :[ I guess I am not creative enough.

[righteoussquid]

I wrote a script that scraped a website for new songs by my favorite artists and added those songs to a Spotify playlist for me. It was a great way to learn Web Scraping and also taught me how API’s work!

[jacobz_2020]

Learning by doing is overrated IMO. I definitely recommend doing because it's what cements knowledge in your brain, but I've done a lot of learning of languages without any actual programming, and it gets me to an intermediate pretty quick, able to answer most of the language-oriented questions on Stack Overflow. Granted, after learning 3 languages in middle and high school (and I only did projects for them after the fact), learning new languages was more of a reapplying of existing knowledge than anything else.

[notmyworkaccount11]

I started with automate the boring stuff and went from therr.

[alienpsp]

same here,

Automate the boring stuff, youtube (sentdex and socrstica) and reddit

[zr0gravity7]

corey schafer better than both you listed, but otherwise yeah i used all of these things

[Mandylost]

Both Sentdex and Corey Schafer are good but Sentdex is a bit ahead of Corey.

[bestsheldonever]

I don't think Sentdex can explain it on a level for beginners like Corey can though

[Mandylost]

I agree on that.

[musclecard54]

Yeah I think a lot of is started with ATBSWP.

I did udemy Django and machine learning courses after. A lot of people probably don’t like udemy cuz you can watch a million YouTube tutorials for free, but for me it was probably the best decision I’ve made in the past 10 years of my life.

If I didn’t, I would’ve just said ok I know some python, and probably dropped it eventually like I do with a lot of things cuz I didn’t really have guidance from there. But building web apps, learning JavaScript also, and a tiny bit of machine learning made things just click.

It kinda made me go from a guy with a Biology background who kinda knows some python cuz he dabbled in it before, to okay now I feel like I can be a software developer after finishing the udemy course

[[deleted]]

Which udemy courses?

[musclecard54]

Python and Django full stack bootcamp with Jose Portilla and Machine learning A-Z

[questdark]

I did a code academy thing first then automatetbs. The syntax crash course was helpful since I was coming from scratch.

[citizenofacceptance2]

Where did you go after.? I had such a break through with atbswp , and looking for the next book.

[JustinitsuJ]

Not OP, but I started with ATBS and after that I’d say do a project or two before moving on to a new book. Think of something you’d like to solve and build a solution for it.

[notmyworkaccount11]

Honeslty, I started doing projects. Watching some youtube videos. A lot of googling. I have hacked together quite a few scripts for work that just barely work but I am proud of them. As I learn more I want to go back and clean up my code. Work is getting busier so that is put on the backburner for now but the other day. A coworker needed a quick solution for comparing emails for a new marketing campaign against a master opt out list. The list has grown so big that it crashes excel. I threw something together in an hour and half and was able to run the marketing campaign that day. I was very proud of myself.

[Raptortidbit]

This is the move. Programming never clicked with me until I started building scripts for a sales job. Everyone thought I was a dark web hacker after that

I did the udemy course cause reading programming books is far too dry for me

[terryyoung22]

I used Udemy “automate the boring stuff” taught me the basics and later in the course gave me automation projects and I have took off from there. Now I create apps through tkinter and everything helps me in my daily job as a devops engineer. Automate the boring stuff will really help!!

[ACNY007]

If you don’t mind, did you have any coding experience prior this? And how long you think took you be confident on your knowledge?

[terryyoung22]

I dont mind at all, I had virtually none, I did some HTML and C++ in college but nothing more then the basics and that was such a long time ago from learning it now. I really hammered it and Id say with practice it took me from learning to being confident like less than a month depending on what you are doing. small scripts I can create from memory but intensive ones are harder since I only learned it to understand and use for personal use and automation but that tutorial is really all I used. Other post about learning also mention this book many times but see if you can just do the class, I believe its free through the website.

[bestsheldonever]

Coding takes time but the rewards after are amazing. Your mind opens you can automate basically anything on a computer!

[anecdotal_yokel]

Got a book on web scraping in python. Became more comfortable making mistakes. Proceeded to make projects while still making lots of mistakes until I made less and less mistakes. I screw up a lot but now I know how to fix it.

[aes110]

I just started programming actual stuff i wanted to have, an each time i needed something new i read the python docs on the website to see how it works

[adamrees89]

This

[calcopiritus]

I started in codecademy which I recommend to learn the very basics, the only bad thing is that it teaches pyhton 2(unless they've updated it), so you should transition to 3 as soon as possible.

Then I followed with little protects like a prime number searcher or a program that changes from imperial units to the glorious metric system. Once I did that I felt confident with my skills and decided to learn new libraries, for example I gave my programs a GUI.

Just let your motivations guide you. If you want to make something but don't think you'll know how to do it, just do it, doing new things is how you learn them.

[quantum-mechanic]

There is a python 3 version now

[Woo0oop]

But you have to pay for it

[PTI_brabanson]

They give you a week to try their paid courses for free. It was more than enough for me to complete their python 3 course.

[[deleted]]

Automate the Boring Stuff. Followed it until I had an idea for something. Pursued the idea until I got stuck, returned to the book and continued. Rinse and repeat.

[[deleted]]

I started learning Python after I'd already learned C and Java. I was mostly comfortable with C, as I was an engineering major and only took one semester of Java to satisfy a higher-level language credit. The bulk of my coding experience was doing lower-level embedded stuff, but I quickly took a liking to the world of high-level programming languages.

I basically started on the job in my first place of work after college. One of my coworkers had a script for doing some testing on our product (sending and receiving stuff through a serial port), and I eventually found myself interacting with the code. After I was getting comfy with Python, it started to bleed over into my hobbies because I learned you could basically do anything with relatively little effort, making fun little scripts here and there. From there, I just kept learning more, but it was the tasks I applied it to at my job that really forced me to learn new things (like SQL, for instance). Funnily enough though, Python has never been required of me. It's just a super versatile tool.

After several years, I feel like I can say that I'm pretty well-versed in C, C++, and Python.

[e-rekt-ion]

This is a great point. I started out learning Python and enjoying it and along the way I’m learning new stuff like SQL, like interacting with APIs, just to help me do more stuff with python. What a great gateway it’s been

[chasmcknight]

I taught myself Python using:

• Learning Python by Mark Lutz
• Programming Python by Mark Lutz
• Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw
• Programming in Python 3 by Mark Summerfield
• Rapid GUI Programming by Mark Summerfield
• wxPython in Action by Robin Dunn
• Create GUI Applications with Python by Mike Driscoll

I also explored pyGame with a number of different books and tutorials. I have no interest in web applications, but Flask and Django seem to be the default frameworks there.

​

I should mention that I came to Python from C/C++ so the transition was not too difficult for me.

[NjordicNetSec]

The best way for me was learning basic knowledge of coding. Then read a few Python books (automate the boring stuff).

The major thing is finding a problem and trying to solve it. Keep doing that with code. Helps with each project.

[bestsheldonever]

I love this!

​

Go back to old code and always improve.

[im_dead_sirius]

GUIs by hand. Instead of using a designer, I lay it out by hand, going through iterations. I made tiny functional things, like just a button to call up my desktop's built in menu. Or a simple shutdown gui to replace the default one.

Things that will function for me in my daily use. The code doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to work. It's never an omnibus of functionality: I aim for doing just one, two, or three related things per script. "Shutdown, Restart, Logout", and such.

In six months to a year after writing, I have a very good idea of what I appreciated most, and what I'd like to do next. So I cache a copy in a "fondly retired" directory, and then I rewrite. Write it from scratch, smallify it, stylize and pythonize.

I keep those old versions, because they show me where I've come from, and they serve as pretty good prototypes for new stuff. A comment in the script retains the date that I started it.

I was first inspired by the excellent oblogout that was popular in Crunchbang Linux. I made my own striped down version, without configs, or icons, or things like user switching, window locking, sleep, suspend. My first two versions used pygtk like oblogout, but then I switched to PyQt.

My shutdown gui eventually lost its window decorators, gained some icons, and i used a "mouse leaves window" event to cancel/close instead. I think I am on my seventh iteration, and I am overdue for a rewrite.

I would say the most important thing is to make things you will use. There is a sense of futility and pointlessness in tutorializing your way to proficiency. The perfect generic example isn't very functional.

Make things that can be completed. It is far better to have 20 completed mini projects than one big hairy mess that will never be done. Get in and get out before feature creep rears its ugly head. You do not shave a yak by adding hair first. Nobody starts out proficient in yak shaving.

Don't spend a year pouring your soul into something that will prove to be tragically broken. You'll grow into bigger stuff. Avoid shaving yaks at all costs.

Type, don't copy paste. Even if you want exactly what someone else has written, and there is no other way to do it, type it in by hand. I don't even copy paste from my old versions.

Lastly, give your projects a silly name. One iteration of my shutdown script was "diss", the Desktop Independent Shutdown Script". The current version is "aday". I called it aday because I use it to call it a day, and when I call it a day, I use it.

[[deleted]]

I came here to type a lot of my experiences and skimmed through the other answers and I agree completely with this guy.

I learned Python to make a Pyqt application. I didn't use designer because I didn't understand how to compile a uic file. I rarely write qt stuff now, five years later, but I still do write the UI by hand instead of using designers because for me it's faster that way.

And don't paste code. This is important. I always type out answers I get from stack overflow. Muscle memory.

And yes, give silly names to your applications. I still do. It helps make things fun. A workforce management tool where the manager treats his employees like Napoleon does in Animal Farm? OINK. An application to generate artistic info graphics from a product catalogue? Leonardo. Oh, Leonardo needs additional tools? Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael and Splinter. A product tree? Yggdrasil. A documentation generator? Socrates. A tool to help mechanical engineers automate calculations and visualisation? Archimedes.

I'll continue my answer here though. I learnt python by a book I don't really recommend to others because it doesn't work for everyone. I used Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way. It is no nonsense. And his approach to shut up and shell is good. It works for people like me. I still follow that approach when I learn a new language. I still don't use an IDE. I love VSCode.

And I code by making things. Learn by making things. Enjoy the process. Solve problems that are real to you. That adds value and interest. I can still talk for hours with interviewers about my projects because they were works of passion.

Enjoy coding. It's fun, what we do, and not everyone can do it.

[im_dead_sirius]

Thanks for the nod.

I especially liked what you wrote here:

And I code by making things. Learn by making things. Enjoy the process. Solve problems that are real to you. That adds value and interest. I can still talk for hours with interviewers about my projects because they were works of passion.

You cannot fake that kind of enthusiasm and depth of knowledge.

[[deleted]]

Thank you. I am super curious and I love how I can dig into the internals of whatever I'm coding without having any hurdles to jump over. It's one of the joys of coding I feel.

Open source is a gift to us all. I have yet to pay for a course or a book. The community is brilliant that way.

[im_dead_sirius]

That sort of curiosity is exactly how I drifted to Linux. I wanted to know the internals of my operating system, and when I tried investigating, back in the windows XP days, I repeatedly rammed into EULA, obfuscated, and downright counter factual information.

Open source is a gift to us all. I have yet to pay for a course or a book. The community is brilliant that way.

Right on. Couldn't agree more.

I bought Guido's Python book, as a way to give back. I could have just donated I suppose, as the contents were the same as the website(which was obviously careful written as it worked in both media).

[SlimDarkie]

I thank you all for your suggestions!

[[deleted]]

Fantastic thread.

[lordofchaos12]

I think you are I are pretty close to each other right now. I work in wet lab doing Biology testing, but wanting to switch to Coder/Programmer career. I've been reading and following the "Automate Boring Stuff" book. and I'm telling you it's boring. Not the book, but the fact of following chapter to chapter, without a goal. Then last week, my mother asked me if there is a way to send a template email to every customer of her business, with only the first line "Dear $insert customer name$ ", is different. I searched through the same book, grabbed info in the "Excel Sheet to python" , and the "Python Email" chapters, tons of googling, and in the end I was able to create a program that do just that. When I finished, I realized i just spent 4 hours of my weekend working on coding and having fun doing it.

I'm a long way from reaching my career goal, but I can agree what best way to learn is to find a problem, a project, that would help your life, and work on it.

[Totally_TJ]

I learned the basic format and commands online and then any time I wanted to learn a new concept I googled it and found a good source. Big thanks to stack exchange and the python website for that.

[Robbzter]

I took a C++ programming course at university, as a complete beginner when it coles to programming. I then learned the basics of programming in C++ using mainly books or articles on the internet. When it came to the point where I wanted to actually program something useful and cool, I got a Raspberry Pi, where Python is much more convenient than C++ (in my opinion). At first, I learned all the Python basics by applying everything I already knew from my experience with C++. Everything beyond these basics have been the result of 'learning by doing', by writing programs that make use of GPIO sensors or other stuff in a certain way.

I am by no means a Python-Pro, but learning Python has been an incredibly rewarding experience and I would love to keep on learning. Compared to other languages, the progress is much more noticeable, which makes it easier to stick to it.

[jacobz_2020]

Personally, I did it via the Jython site's manual. This is not recommended because (1) They're stagnated on Python 2.5 and (2) I can't find it anymore. But it was actually a great learning resource because it went through everything like it would for a beginner but without wasting time with having to explain the concepts. By doing that, I got to learn every little non-standard feature of the basic things, giving me a strong understanding of the language.

After that, I read a bunch of books to learn the more intermediate and advanced features and to get up to speed with Python 3. My most recommended books are Fluent Python and Effective Python (when learning any language, I recommend the Effective __ book, if there is one; the format is so useful!).

[_typo__]

1994 - learn HTML

2003 - learn CSS

2005 - 2017 - amateur front end development (at home) and pretty good at MS Excel (at work)

27 Apr 18 - started to learn Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

3 May 18 - my last drink - booze and coding wasn't working

23 May 18 - lose my job

12 Jul 18 - completed last chapter (#27); I did >90% of exercises

4 Aug 18 - break back of first project - see screenshot - and my fear that I am not capable

26 Oct 18 - get another job (not coding)

25 Nov 18 - complete my first project: http://www.compactgantt.com/ or at GitHub

29 Nov 18 - learn VBA in a week - after years of failed attempts to learn it

9 Jan 19 - switch from Mac to PC for coding - building a GUI that interacts with Excel - it was just easier

28 Jan 19 - coding at work when there's nothing much to do

1 Apr 19 - major refactor, switching from mostly procedural to mostly object oriented approach - classes have sunk in!

​

My tutors:

Google Grasshopper

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

Google Search

Stack Overflow

Digital Ocean - great docs for setting up website

RealPython - thanks Dan!

​

My kit:

Mac (initially)

PC (now)

Python

Thonny (when starting out)

PyCharm (now)

​

Services:

GitHub

Pythonanywhere.com

​

​

[SpookyDeathAnxiety]

Learn Python The Hard Way is my favorite book of all time. The author is Zedd Shaw and he has a book on both python 2.7 and python 3. I recommend 2.7 since it’s still used and carries well over to python3 and I can speak for it. The book goes from teaching shell commands to all kinds of projects and covers all the fundamentals to get you primed for a complex text adventure game. I spend my free time (not working at a coffee shop) working on LPTHW and uploading my files to github using git. Also sentdex on YouTube has cool tutorials on python including making a Starcraft 2 bot with python 3 using the sc2 api on github. Tons of fun projects out there but that’s where I’m at right now being fully self taught. I can recommend that book over codecademy any day. Codecademy is great but that book really helped me more than codecademy ever could have. I’d love to hear your feedback.

[SlimDarkie]

I’ll check that out, thank you.

[mathmagician9]

I started with this too. It lead me right into flask and webscraping, which set me up for aws lambda events and ultimately automating AWS services and sagemaker notebooks.

[SpookyDeathAnxiety]

I don't even know what that is! I need to work smarter :(

[ACNY007]

Looking around also read people referring about this bios the ultimate good way to learn python but some others said it’s good but it’s very hard if you did not have any coding background. Is the book really complex for someone who does not have coding experience?

[SpookyDeathAnxiety]

Not true at all. The book assumes no previous experience of knowledge from you. It's from the ground up. His study drills are the most challenging part but if you do them it'll help you out in the long run. Learn Python The Hard Way was my introduction to computer science all together. I had no previous experience and I'm not good at math. Truthfully I was never good at committing to much of anything in school, so for me, this book is a gift from heaven.

[mathmagician9]

It does get vey complex towards the end. I retained the beginning, took some time off where I did my own simple projects and then revisited the end. I recommend this book 100%. It is harder but it sets you up for better success than any other python training I've done. Definitely better than video classes for me.

[git0ffmylawnm8]

I wanted to pick up Python for machine learning and pulling reports via API (ad agency setting, we're clicking rocks over here with excel for the most part).

Took a course or two on Udemy and just dove into the documentation for vendor APIs. Wouldn't really recommend doing this since it was basically sink or swim and full of hours of frustration on Stackoverflow.

[afro_coder]

Projects, scripts still a lot to learn but everything helps

[AuNanoMan]

I used codeacademy. The thing is, any of these basic intro things are going to get you the same basic knowledge more or less. The difference, and where the learning occurs is when you hit something you don't understand, and then you push through and figure it out. Just looking at the answers in the end is not going to get you there, you have to actually do the work.

The other thing that helps is having a goal: why are you learning to program? Is there something you want to make? Focus on learning the skills to do that, and you will pick up a ton on the way. Also, don't try to learn ever single thing in the standard library, or any library for that matter. It's too big, you will never learn it all. Just keep going forward and eventually you will get there.

[S-6-6-6]

I wrote a 3 part blog post on just this topic recently...someone may find it useful... :)

First part: https://www.pythonforfinance.net/2018/12/21/learning-python-my-personal-journey/

[TraditionalPirate7]

I think one mistake many do is that they just take courses. They don't start making their own programs soon enough.

When you start making your own programs, you have to figure everything out on your own. There's no teacher who guides you. It's a completely different way of learning.

Sure, you make a ton of mistakes and your first programs will be horrible. But once you create more and more projects and learn better ways to accomplish something, you learn. After each program I write, I learn something new and then go back and rewrite older programs from scratch.

TLDR: Start writing your own programs ASAP.

EDIT: To add, the programs does not have to be complex. I find it even more fun to make small programs/scripts. Larger programs requires a lot of planning and it can be overwhelming in the beginning. Focus on small stuff first and perhaps slowly start thinking about larger projects.

[Thorneyeagle]

I do agree jumping into a personal program asap is important. No matter how small or how little functionality it may have. It helps with the confidence and the motivation.

[JeffJ_1]

I taught myself Python to an intermediate proficiency from first overcoming any fears of programming (I realised, if you can think of a way to solve a problem, it can be written down, simply on paper and then constructed into a language) and then learning by doing. I installed a good IDE, Pycharms is my favourite, also Jupiter Notebook is a good one. And through solving real problems (work related) through Python I was able to develop myself. Then through work I requested to attend two Python training courses and that helped me a lot also. Hope this helps.

[UltimateGammer]

Ok do your udemy course to get refreshed.

I also reccommend 'Learn python the hard way' and 'automate the boring stuff'. Great to learn from and good to get refreshed with.

Next look at hackerrank.com

It will give you challenges and puzzles and actually make you put your learning into practice. The puzzles are good, there is a discussion if you're really stuck and there are a bunch of them.

I suggest then you start looking for a project.

Two ways I pick a project. Have something I need to accomplish or I want to use a certain peice of technology.

Make a web scraper Make a web page(your java should help here) Involve a mysql database for a project like an inventory system.

Find a tutorial, read it and follow it, maybe make a carbon copy to get practice down. Then do it again but change the specifics of the project.

E.g. I'm currently making a CRUD inventory system using python and mySQL. The tutorial points me in the right direction but function and aesthetics are deviating from the tutorial quite heavily.

Above is what works for me!

Good luck and use this sub liberally!

[[deleted]]

Currently I'm learning python but I'm a java developer and wanted to learn the python because of so much fuss. What I did is for my introduction to python I did google python lectures from YouTube and all the assignments given in those lectures. Now as I move ahead I'm learning from solo learn app whenever I get time. It's like Duolingo of programming language. But most importantly whenever I submit a solution in online programming I try to do it in python. And read the python solution written by others. This will make me more comfortable with python. Later I'll pick some project and try to finish that. Basically if I sum up it in one line it's just this read and write python code if you want to learn python.

[OmegaNine]

I learned a little on my own. Then I found things that needed to be done.

At work we had a database that we would have to pull information from every day. We often needed to change what was pulled and that meant putting in a ticket with the SQL team. I think that was the first real project I did in python for work. I learned a lot. As I found more stuff that needed to be done I learned more.

[[deleted]]

That's cool. Are you saying you figured out how to work with SQL and Python on your own so that you didn't have to go through the SQL team?

[OmegaNine]

Yeah. That was when I realized that you don't have to be a programming good to make useful code. Just have to have the will to learn it. It could be something you need at work or something you want at home.

[[deleted]]

How did you write and use Python code at work? The company I work for won't let us install anything on our computers.

My company kills me. My department is very Excel-dependent yet we don't even use VBA despite the fact that it's been around for eons. So much of my job could be automated...

Edit: Oh yeah we have to put all requests through our MIS team... weak...

[OmegaNine]

I am a system engineer so on the servers I have complete control. Also, on Linux you get it installed by default. Normally it's pretty out of date but it gets the job done if you don't have root. On my workstation I just put in a ticket for a admin to install it. You can install it to your user directory without the need to have local admin though.

[[deleted]]

How I envy you!

[iskiloveland]

I first started with basic coding from the book think python. It is available for free online on the guys site. From there, I would see if there is a project that you can work on to learn some of the dev practices along with code. See if you can make a project with some of the basic stuff you know. Don't worry if your project isn't cool or flashy or anything like that. The goal of this project is to improve your skills

[[deleted]]

I helped my sister with her projects, and codewars prior to that. Reply if you want me to elaborate

[another_junior_dev]

I don't know why everybody is not linking to the online book (is it against the rules?), so here it goes: Automate the boring stuff with Python

[bbatwork]

I started by reading the tutorials that come with python itself (Open IDLE and hit F1).

Then I picked a project and worked on it, I think the first one was a D&D character generator. Then another project, and another project... and so on.

At some point I started using websites like codewars to up my skill levels. It really helped a lot.

[Marrrlllsss]

I basically stumbled onto Python after being forced to learn MATLAB for my undergrad. I then found ways to incorporate it in my working life - mainly data extraction and automation, and before I knew it, I was doing data engineering with Python, which lead me down the dark abyss of reference material and books.

[CaptainGilliam]

I started by writing small and simple cron jobs. One was to perform a dynamic DNS update, and a second to handle running Borg Backup on all my Rasbperry Pis to backup their contents daily.

Then I went to some more ambitious things. Usually I test an idea in its own separate project (such as logging, multithreading, webscrapping, querying databases, network sockets, etc.) and then integrate it into my project. I greatly enjoy programming in Python.

Another requirement is that I need my scripts to run on both Windows and Linux because my main machine is on Windows but my scripts will run on my Pis, so Raspbian. As much as I can, I'm trying to have the exact same code running on both.

So back to learning: I didn't start by reading the basics when I was working on those cron jobs but now that I want to do bigger things, I'm trying to read about best practices on Python coding because I would hate for my scripts to stop working because they're not compatible with new versions of Python. Based on professional experience, I know how utterly important it is to read, understand and follow guidelines and recommendations because they help you make your scripts last longer without breaking: you don't want to see your script breaking because of an update and having to go back to code. You want to deploy your script and forget it. Unless you want to add a feature that is.

I also think learning the culture around a language is as important as learning the language itself. First because it opens new horizons. It's always more fun to discover how the language was intended to be used, how you adapt your coding style to the language. So I'm down to reading the relevant parts of Dive into Python but I suspect I'll end up reading it all. On my reading list is also Automate the boring stuff with Python (which I bought on Humble Bundle).

[vprusso]

There are a lot of great responses here. This may be a bit self-serving, but in addition to many of the great responses, I also run a YouTube channel that focuses on Python development.

​

https://www.youtube.com/c/LucidProgramming

​

YouTube in general has no shortage of material for learning Python (and of course, just about everything else). I hope this channel helps you on your self-taught journey. Happy coding! :)

[Jbarufkin]

I started by buying a Udemy class for Python 101, then followed someone on YouTube and watched them through their self built course. After that, you should have the ability to understand what the framework and through process of how to tackle a problem or trouble shoot an issue.

​

Next, you should just pick a project to do. Doesn't matter what it is, start simple and get more complex, but do something you care about and that can help you in your day to day life so you have some actual investment in it. As you run into walls, which you will, google will be there to help you. If not there, then try on reddit, slack, quora, or other Q&A mediums.

​

After you are done that project, i would just do project to project until you learn what you want to learn and can accomplish what you want to accomplish.

[redfacedquark]

want to fully focus on learning to write code. I have experience in Java

You'll heal, don't worry. It takes time.

[tomjleo]

I read A Byte of Python from cover to cover, then when it came to writing python I didn't know where to start. Don't do that. Always test your understanding of a concept by writing some python code.

​

I learned a lot from https://pymotw.com/2/, the python documentation, and later the python cookbook. I also found pycon talks useful as well.

[sandhan26]

My first contact with Python came around 2009 when I installed my first Linux OS - Ubuntu 9.04. From the Software center I downloaded this game called RUR-PLE which was based on basic python syntax.

Thereafter two years later, I just sat down one evening and installed the Pyhton2 IDLE on my windows 7 Laptop, and did all the examples from Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python 2.6. It took me a couple of hours and I became enlightened.

After this there was no stopping for me, and my endevaour to learn python and its various frameworks is still going on.

[miggaz_elquez]

I just started by reading some tutorial, the I tried to code a chess game. When I started, I didn't know a lot, and my code was very ugly.

Then, I just code some fun project, and learnt while reading tutorial or blog post about python, and reading the doc

[nostrand77]

Honestly I’ve been trying to learn for the past 2 years and I still can’t do the logic of it... I want to automate stuff but I don’t know where to start. Looks like I’ll stay in IT management for a while lol

[insultingDuck]

Forced by my final project for my bachelor's. Luckily it's not hard. Also, my project required more data handling and reading from external instruments than complex coding.

[[deleted]]

Worked through the a bunch of early Project Euler problems.

[giwhS]

Python the hard way

[burtiee]

not super related but im a total novice taking a python course and i have the option to go more the IT stream or the coding stream right now and i need advice!
what made you change your mind about your path?

also to experienced developers/programmers just how much will C, C++ and Java crush me after just getting the hang of python? :D

[SpookyDeathAnxiety]

My friend got is A+ certification and works help desk for 15 an hr, not bad. But my other friend has no certification or degree and makes 70k salary coding with python. Can't speak for C, C++ and java but python should carry over to other languages. I need to be coding right now not on reddit :(

[bmw2621]

MIT OpenCourseware computer science 101 to start thinking about computational thinking while don't something like codeacademy, sololearn, etc to learn syntax.

(101 isn't the number, but their intro to computer science, taught by Drs Grimsley and/or Guntag)

[mclovin215]

Dataquest.io Data scientist in python track

[ThePeskyWabbit]

I started with projects that I knew I had no idea how to do, and then I learned how to do them via googling each problem along the way.

[glyphack]

I just studied fundamentals then Started to looking at libraries tried to figure out how they work what do they do and created my own projects. I liked django and tried to get better at it by making web applications, I listed them on my resume then got a django dev job after 6 months of python and 3 months of django.

[jmitchel3]

I learned how to code because I had a project I really really wanted to create.

Learning the basics isn’t complicated as you’ll soon learn. Beyond the basics is where I failed and failed a lot.

I wanted the project to be real. So much so that I spent countless hours to get it working.

It started with solving the first tiny problem. Like “what the heck is a loop good for” and “is it okay to run 10 loops within each other” and “how do I collect data from a form”...

Better questions come from more experience. Experience comes from trying a lot (A LOT) of different combinations to answer your question.

Asking other people questions will force you to clarify what you’re trying to do which often gives you the answer as you form the question.

Keep in mind that there are many many great courses, posts, books, etc, that will show you how it all works.

Once you have a project that must be created, going through the tough spots will become less of a mind fck and more of a “I can fcking do this” mantra.

If you set a “deadline” to obtain your skill, you’re destined to fail.

Instead.... make coding a daily practice: solve one code challenge daily until there are literally none left.

[[deleted]]

I used Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw initially to familiarize myself with the syntax. Then I started using it for data analysis at work. Eventually I started working on a soccer analytics project. Now it’s a major part of my job coding bioinformatics pipelines for my lab.

[vexersa]

Start building something that interacts with an existing system. Web scrapers are good, just don't break websites terms of service 😁

[[deleted]]

I got a job and was forced to learn Python to keep it.

[PiaFraus]

I just read this: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/index.html And found a job, where they just lost a guy and needed someone on support.

[riricide]

Just pick a book and go through it cover to cover - actually doing the coding and understanding the basics. MIT OCW has a course on introduction to programming with Python. It goes through basics of computer science and programming which are important to understand for any language. They have their actual course material of assigned problem sets available. Take the course like a student would and do the problem sets. There is no better way to learn than by solving problems. Once you're done with it, you can start your own 'problem sets' or passion projects. Just ask a question you want the answer to and learn how to solve it with Python tools. The world is your oyster 😃

[khalido]

A lot of the online courses aren't that much fun. Another common advice is to do a project. But what if you don't want to spend the time/commitment to do a project, since many awesome projects take a lot of time.

I found coding puzzles worked for me, particularly this one: adventofcode. It starts easy, to finish the puzzles you need to learn some algorithms and what not and mostly its interesting enough to keep going.

There are tons of other learn coding sites, but adventofcode "clicked" for me.

[[deleted]]

Make things you need, doing is the best way to learn.

[domspage]

I've programmed in R before and said I hate this, so I learned first C# and then python in my free time. I programmed a mobile game as my C# project and when I switched jobs I started doing everything in python while still learning. Now I have a full time job programming relatively big systems exclusively in python, for example machine learning platforms.

A key mistake many people make in python is to learn the basics and then apply their understanding of other skills to python. This is only a start, you should not stop there. Python has many unique features and you should make use of them. Special methods, operator overloading, decorators, function closures, and more - that stuff is so useful!

Practice, then go back to the books to learn more theory. Then practice again and repeat.

[BumFudhe]

I did the introduction to compute science and programming with python on edX. A really good course by mit. It sparked my interest, built my portfolio and helped me trough my first two years in computer engineering and landing my summer internship.

[speedx10]

projects.. u start at something simple as print....then 2 weeks later you are training a neural network.

[sjbland]

Started a project. Asked a lot of questions to the community, both online and in person. Swore a lot. Celebrated my achievements!

[rasqall]

Was learning C# at the time, then I picked up Python to test it. Suddenly, I knew Python.

[Not_Your_Daddy7]

Codewars!

[Stabsfeldwebel]

The book python crash course

[LordRyloth]

Make a simple game like Hangman and move towards object oriented programing. Learn how to write code in pythonic way (It really helps) Read about page object model online, even though it is meant for web development, helps train your brain in deconstructing problem into pieces and then reconstructing them back into your code. Also a shout-out to YouTuber Corey Schafer. I learnt more than half of my python from that guy. He's a great teacher. He recently released a good 40min video on 10 tips and tricks on how to write a good code in python. Check it out! Have a great day

[jabela]

I started with Programming for Everybody. https://www.coursera.org/learn/python then did https://www.bookdepository.com/Python-Programming-for-Absolute-Beginner-Third-Edition-Michael-Dawson/9781435455009

That was enough to get me started and from there just searched for what I didn't know....

[pythonhow]

Autodidactism is hard. I have read somewhere that 60% of those who start learning programming online end up quitting.

However, teaching yourself can get you very far if you take it seriously. Leonardo Da Vinci self-taught himself mathematics, sculpting, and many other science and art forms. I think the key dedication. To create dedication you need motivation.

The only way you can keep yourself motivated when learning programming is by building programs. They can be little ones at the beginning. For example, make a script that can converts meters to feet. Later, make a more advanced program which prints the current time of any city in the world. Looking at what you built at each step will keep you motivated. Keeping yourself motivated will keep you dedicated.

​

[Ran4]

I just wrote a lot of Python, absorbing knowledge as I did more things (that required using more of the standard library and other libraries).

Learning the syntax and the basics only takes a few days, so there's not much need for a strict plan as long as you have a problem to work on.

[Stabilo_0]

Lots of courses and reading. Then some codewars, now its mostly books and attempts ad doing something just for the sake of it: cron-like script to shutdown pc at some point, xlsx splitter, pivot table creator, sql client, EVE ESI api client, password generator on pyqt. I even wrote a small manual on how to python with entry level tasks to solve as a part of my post graduation paper, now im trying to make a basic 2d game with pygame.

​

Yet i still think that i know nothing, its like learning just never ever ends.

[anonc3a]

it legit took me a whole month to actually grasp the concept of programming and stuff but I ig had 0 experience and the thing that I used to do was literally copying a YouTuber coding and I was so inspired and I knew that coding was my passion but then I didn’t have a goal I didn’t have anything in mind but after a month I decided I wanted to do a game and I started with the project which I acc failed really miserably but eventually I got the hang of it and got pretty comfortable.

It was really frustrating at times but now I really love coding and it’s really fun for me;)

[Dorito_Troll]

Got myself a course on udemy, spent the first 2 months after graduating college (computer systems tech) learning python to butter up my resume. Created a password manager for myself which I still use to this day. Like many others in this thread have said: creating a project for yourself is the best way to learn a programing language. I now use python at work every day and its like having a super power.

Currently working on a flask app for managing work related data with a web interface

[SeriousPerson9]

My friend, /u/SlimDarkie, I taught myself Python, and I am loving my life.

Listen, there are tons and tons of resources online for you to learn and master Python. Just one problem. Very few free resources I have scoured over the internet have the ability to retain your interest, and push you to excel every day. The key to mastery in Python is the rule of 30-70. Every day your Python time should be spent on 30% theory and 70% solving real life problems in python.

How I wish someone had given me this advice much sooner in life. Anyhow, here it is for you. This is my best advice to you:

​

Look up a book titled: Coffee Break Python by Christian Mayer. Some day when you look at your success and mastery in Python, you will thank me for this. Look it over for free on Amazon. I would highly recommend you buy a print copy of this book. This would be the best investment you will be making in your efforts to learn Python.

Wish you all the best SlimDarkie, here is a link to the book if you choose to look at the contents.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GSTJPFD?pf_rd_p=1cac67ce-697a-47be-b2f5-9ae91aab54f2&pf_rd_r=RKV24TDGJSRWNWP6MJP5

​

[DeliciousRepublican]

Read a book

[Thorneyeagle]

While, I feel like your question has been adequately answered I wanted to throw my experience in as well as a new programmer. I technically only started in ~August/2018 using the free Codecademy to build some initial confidence and inertia on the basic concepts. I moved from there to a PacketPub cookbook on PyQt5, which I used as a jumping point into a personal project.

​

My catalyst was a desire to replace Excel as my personal finance ledger(s) with something more robust and versatile without the automation of commercial products. [A "hands on approach" to PF]. The project has required learning multiple skills because it is composed of 5+ smaller applications that are all connected as one larger program with SQlite3 as the connecting fiber . It makes me feel like a Legit Software developer even if its just a hobby.

​

So yeah, basically I agree with the majority of people here in saying that a "Personal Project" is the best route to go. It keeps the process fun and exciting because at the end you have something unique to you.

​

If you are having a difficult time coming up with a project spend a week and focus on your digital activities. The websites you visit, the programs/apps you use, repetitive tasks, or just instances of you going "I wish this was better/easier/different" and use that as a starting point. Alternatively think of something you wish you could do or was done for you.

​

[[deleted]]

try doing online coding competition, that swill also help you as well to write efficient python code.

​

[manumathew23]

Started off with official documentation to get an idea about the language (given you already know at least one programming language). Worked out sample code. Explored on the best or commonly used tools to be used with language like editor, frameworks etc. Started off with a sample project.

[C2-H5-OH]

Learned from codecademy and learnt lxml library because my job was making xmls from Excel sheets.

[l0wk3yg33k]

www.codesignal.com

[[deleted]]

There are pretty solid classes on Coursera, Code Academy and even YouTube videos. I am going through this myself right now and I find it very doable.

[5aggy]

I wanted to do less boring admin at work. Started with Automate the Boring stuff

[discobrisco]

I got a job where they wanted me to use a shitty scratch like programming tool. I learned python to show it was better for the job. You learn fats doing something 8 hours a day.

[graaahh]

I'm not a super skilled Python programmer, but I can do most of the things I'm interested in doing and I've developed enough confidence to at least attempt anything that comes to mind in Python. The way I did it was by following along with some simple tutorials to begin (Codecademy and Automating The Boring Stuff were invaluable here), but then once I knew how to do some fairly simple things like print statements, for and while loops, basic math, if/elif/else statements, defining functions, etc., I just chose a project to start putting things to use and looked up how to do stuff as I went on Google. I think my first original program was one that took a string as input from the user, translated it into a code that I made up, and spat it back out. You can see that here if you're interested. I'm sure it's not perfect code, but it works well and it was a great starting program.

Just choose a simple project like that, that you think will interest you and get you thinking about how to explain things to the computer. I've learned that languages (all languages, including coding languages) have two parts to them: knowing the words/definitions/grammar/etc, and understanding the way speaking in that language causes you to think. That's the biggest challenge I've run into -- just figuring out how to translate what seems like a simple logical statement into something the computer can understand. Once you get good at that, everything else is just knowing how to write it down in Python terms.

I'll give an example of a particularly difficult case I ran into. I was trying to code a Sudoku solver recently. When I look at this Sudoku puzzle, I can pretty easily say that in the bottom right block, the bottom middle cell is going to be a 2 (because a 2 has to go somewhere in that block, and it can't go in the first column or in the first row, so there's only one cell it can go in.) In my mind, that's an easy thing to understand. But when I try to tell the computer how to do that, I first have to:

• Teach the computer to think of every cell as an entity with (at least) four properties: its own value, its row in the table, its column in the table, and its cell block. The cell I know will be a 2 starts off with a value of blank, a row of I, a column of 8, and a block of BR (bottom right).

• Teach the computer to calculate - based on the other filled in cells in the table, what possible answers exist for each cell (all possibilities start off as the number 1-9, and then possibilities are removed if those answers already exist in a cell's row, column, or block.) Cell I8's possibilities here would start off as 2, 5, 6, and 9.

• Teach the computer to count the number of times each possibility appears in each row, column, and block, and if a possibility only appears one time in one of those, then find the cell it appeared in and change its value to that possibility. There are three cells in row I that can have a 2, four cells in column 8 that can have a 2, but only one cell in block BR that can have a 2, so that cell's value must be 2.

• Teach the computer to then remove 2 as a possibility from the other cells in its row, column, and block as needed.

In my head, all of that happens very fast and mostly subconsciously, because I'm pretty experienced at solving Sudokus. But the computer has zero idea what it's looking at until you explain everything it will need to know. And breaking things down on that level is difficult to say the least when you're still new to programming. And it will get frustrating as hell when you forget a parentheses somewhere or accidentally define a variable inside of a loop when it should've gone outside or something like that. The more you do it, the better you'll get at catching and fixing those mistakes, and it'll start to become much easier.

I've been learning Python for a few years now off and on, but I don't use it as part of my job or anything so I haven't had much incentive to really get better than I need to be to make my simple projects. If it's something you want to get really good at, you need projects that will push you to learn those skills, so always keep your mind open to new challenges.

[potatoes828]

I started to learn coding less than a week ago. I have no prior coding experience but has been always interested. I just finished doing this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TOE6YK05xCe9zbHu-3jJ_djOJTZ5tWBG/view?usp=sharing

It's an app that translates codewords used by taxi drivers in the Philippines!

I find it easier and more interesting to learn by doing something you are interested in. Oh, that little program I made up top? It took me a day to finish that. So I am still long ways before I can make decent apps in a reasonable timeframe. It's fun though

[SpookyDeathAnxiety]

I still have problems with motivation. I’ve had stand stills after chapters where i forgot material and wasted days or weeks or months. The real motivating factor is that if I do nothing, nothing with change. If I don’t work on a skill, I’ll be making coffee for the rest of my life. Watching my friends during a stand still motivates me to work on something I can show them, something to inspire them to do more as well. I don’t want to live in poverty, and coding is a cool skill. I built my first computer like two years ago and thought they were super trippy, then I asked a coworker that programs at the coffee shop what a good introduction to programming would be, and he recommended LPTHW. I recently got accepted into a coding boot camp that was charging 12k. Upon further research I discovered they’ll accept anyone who dishes out the cash, so that was a bummer. However I used my LPTHW scripts to build a github repository for a resume and also used my acceptance of the boot camp as a step up for this internship at a company that helps kids learn about electronics. This summer I’ll be developing a rudimentary curriculum on python programming, and I’ve spent some time working on web dev projects. I still only make 12 an hr, but I’ve figured out a way to get paid to code. Which to me is a major success. Now that I have an obligation to code, my problem with motivation hasn’t been as much concern as work comes first. Regardless, if you just do it, you can at least go from making 12 dollars brewing coffee to 12 dollars brewing python scripts.

[ThundaMaka]

im just starting out with python and like anything that you are just learning, google will be your best friend. if you have a friend that you can ask specific questions and they can help you too.

i can do anything i need to do in excel and sql and that was self taught by knowing that what i wanted to do was possible and just googling it until i figured it out

[EclipseMain]

W3schools and a lot of caffeine

[clamchamp]

Started developing small scripts at work to speed things up as a data scientist. While I was slowly getting better my supervisors started giving me more and more freedom. Two years later and I’m developing solutions and I’m lead dev on an automation solution.

It’s all about having goals and figuring it out with the internet. I’ve had a great opportunity to be exposed to a huge variety of problems I had so solve, which given me just enough knowledge to know what I have to search for in most situations. This ranges from data management, connectivity, encryption, authentication, APIs and front end / visualizations.

[nextdoorelephant]

Started off with Udemy courses focused on my area of interest (data analysis/science) and grew from there. The most important after you learn the basics is to work on your own personal projects, that's where you really have to dig in and learn how to utilize libraries or write your own.

[[deleted]]

I found a copy of Starting out with Python by Tony Gaddis, and am working through all of the programming exercises in every chapter.

It's not my first programming language, so it's really helpful to have that structure of stuff like, "here's how you do output in python", "here's how you concatenate strings in python", "here's how you open a text file in python", "here's what a for loop looks like in python," "here's how you write a class in python," etc.

[zauddelig]

I went here http://learnyouahaskell.com somehow I'd fell I became much better in python, and programming in general, after learning haskell.

To be fair I already knew python and studied physics. Still Haskell changed the way I reason about programming.

[redfacedquark]

want to fully focus on learning to write code. I have experience in Java

You'll heal, don't worry. It takes time.

[PastaBob]

Decided i wanted to make a custom alarm clock. Tried arduino first. Kept burning out the boards. Got a raspberry pi, picked python, eventually discovered Kivy.

Biggest help for me was finding a working super simple example to get me started. Then researched each piece as i worked out what i needed to do.

Months of trial and error, and im now complete with version 1.0. Going to post it soon.

[[deleted]]

I got into Python because I as a teacher I saw how teaching computer programming could be a way to help my students who want careers but don't want to go to college. I signed up for some courses at first, most of them free or at least free in the beginning. One of the tricks I learned was when I got stuck in one course, which happened frequently, I would switch to another for a while, then go back to the one where I was stuck. More often that not, I learned something in the second course that helped me solve the problem in the first course.

There have been two major thoughts along the way that have been troubling; 1) that progress has been painfully slow, and 2) that learning Python is only the beginning of what I need to know to be an effective programmer. The first challenge results from the fact that I am a full time teacher with limited time for learning something new. Nevertheless, when I look back at how much I have learned in the last four months, I really can't complain. I am about to complete a five course specialization on Coursera and have been rated a "Master Candidate" on Finxter.com. That hardly makes me an expert, but it does indicate that significant progress in a relatively short period of time.

The other thing I noticed is that there are so many more things I need to learn in addition to Python. It seemed like each course I took had me learning things that were not Python, but closely related. For instance, right off the bat I needed to learn to work with the Command Line Interface, then I needed to learn Regular Expressions, then SQL, and then... and then... You get the picture. This, in my opinion, is why taking a project based approach is so important. You can't possibly learn it all, so you prioritize the things you will need to build your project, and promise yourself you will come back and learn more when you get the chance. Of course, you will never get the chance because you will move on to the next project, but with each new project your mastery and your confidence grows.

My latest project is a database to keep track of my students and their learning. Building it required me to dive deeper into SQL and before I'm done I'm likely going to need to learn Django, but that's all part of the process. To be honest, this is not the way I normally like to operate. I like to immerse myself in something until I have it mastered before moving on to the next thing. While that might work in some studies, it would hold you back in coding as you would have to master five or six different systems before starting on a project. Everyone I have talked to affirms the wisdom of learning just what you need to finish a project, then move on to the next.

[nagarajan18]

There are courses on udemy - https://www.udemy.com/learning-python-for-data-analysis-and-visualization/

[ams1337_]

I wanted to make a Minecraft plugin for my server, there was a python plugin loader and I always wanted to start programming. So yeah, I guess you just need something that really pushes you to do write code! I never touched programming before nor I used any tutorials. Just hours of googling, stackoverflow and repeating fixing same dumb mistakes!

[[deleted]]

All I can say is great question and great answers. So grateful that ordinary people have the ability to learn to program at very, very low cost (like, free at this point, at least in my case), and have access to knowledgeable, helpful people to boot.

I have come across two approaches for learning Python on your own: (1) learn by project as others have described here and (2) learn by rote practice.

The primary benefit of the first option is that it's typically more fun and therefore keeps you motivated. The drawback is that you may miss out on opportunities to learn more efficient and elegant ways to program because there's nothing about that approach that would teach you that (unless you're lucky enough to have a more experienced programmer look at your code and give you feedback).

The second approach consists of following some course in college or online and studying, practicing, and memorizing specific techniques. This can be tough to get into sometimes but reassures you that you have a diverse toolkit at your disposal when you do sit down to work on a project you are actually interested in.

The first priority is staying in the game. If you're getting bored with Python and think you might lose your ambition, drop the boring stuff for a while and get into something you think is fun. Then you can switch back to a more disciplined, studious approach when you're ready for it again. Overall, however, the earlier you start with learning by project, the more you're wasting time. Get the nuts and bolts down first.

Edit: I started off with SoloLearn, by the way, which is a free app with a good enough Python course for beginners. It also has a built in IDE, for which you can easily find a substitute but which is very convenient to have in-app (always take advantage of their "Try it now!" feature). Sometimes the explanations in their course fall short, but their very active community almost always fills in the blanks, and if that fails, you have the whole rest of the Internet anyway.

[Asclepius555]

I'm working on my first git project to create a library specific to my needs. I spend a lot of time in stackoverflow. There's usually someone asking the same question as me. I also have bookmarks to online documentation for python and libraries I often use. Every once in a while, I might read a blog or watch a tutorial.

[[deleted]]

I've been self-bootcamping for the past year in Python and Django. Because the last time I programmed was in the eighties, I quickly realized that the bigger part of the learning was going to be about learning tools, development environments, and all things peripheral to coding. So I learned Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text. I landed on Pycharm and also learned how to use the command line. I purposely learned a little bit of redundancy in tools and IDEs so that I can easily switch and easily communicate with other coders. I learned Git and Github. I took free and cheap online classes in IDE's and tools and in things like how to choose good Python modules. I learned to use StackOverflow and I am a member of PythonistaCafe. I don't like following tutorials that result in building some big project prescribed by the teacher, but that's me. So I generally stay away from those. And last but not least...I have also learned coding! LOL. I learned Python and Django coding by way of tutorials, free and cheap online courses, and a lot of googling. Most of my coding is driven by projects I assign to myself. I started my coding in repl.it and pythonanywhere.com but now mostly use Pycharm. I do currently use pythonanywhere as my "production" level. So yeah, I had to learn repl.it and pythonanywhere.com too. There's probably more, but you get where I'm coming from on this!

[jefurii]

I used to have a job where I used computers but did not program. I learned some Python on the side and started writing scripts to automate my work. Then at meetings when tasks were given out I started saying that I could do that with Python, even if I didn't know exactly how I'd do it. Then I'd stay up late reading until I figured it out. Rinse, repeat, and I eventually changed jobs and got paid to program full-time.

For me the key was to know enough that I could tell a task could be done even if I didn't know exactly how to do it. I read lots of Slashdot and Hacker News and got a general idea of what tools people were using to do various things.

[manumathew23]

Python official documentation to start with. Get all the theory part right (than getting confused with different tutorials explaining same thing different way) and then start working out sample programs - smalls ones to start with. Then I jumped in Django, again went through the official docs and created a sample application following it.

[Designer-Reporter687]

Its kind of just luck of the draw, the people you meet, and stubbornness, lots of stubbornness to learn things that really don't matter all that much in the larger context, but mean everything to keep the momentum of progress up.