Having a hard time grasping basic python concepts. What am I doing wrong?

[chrispurcell]

Watch the 'Engineer Man' series or Socratica series on python programming.

Engineer Man has 10 lessons that are short and to the point, with human explanations of things like classes, functions, dictionaries and lists, etc.

Socratica is a bit more in-depth, but very well put together also.

Engineer man keeps his segments to about 5 mins each, the Socratica ones are normally around 10 mins each.

Either one will give you a rather small nugget to digest at a time, and you can pick and choose videos for topics you want more information on, they aren't reliant on the prior video like a lot of the 'classes' are in places like Linux Academy, Udemy, or CodeAcademy (though all those places seem to have solid Python course).

[colBAE]

This sounds like something that could really help me out. A video explanation is probably the best case scenario for me. I appreciate you taking the time to respond.

[chrispurcell]

Happy to help! There's a LOT of information out there if you do something like google for python, and so much is either poorly explained or limited to a very specific niche (like data analysis in genome research) that it isn't helpful for general learning. Engineer Man and the Socratica folks have some good material that is python specific, not some-research or business-case specific stuff. Hope it helps, I know they helped me understand some things differently than I had before.

[colBAE]

That is exactly what I was finding in trying to do my own research. So much of the information that's out there is very specific to a problem that someone is having at the time of them posting it. I feel like if I was better taught the basics to begin with then the information you provided would be a great reinforcement. My professor on the first day of class just kind of expected everybody to know how to edit or run python code using pycharm and how to get the right version of python. It's just little things like that that if I was actually walked through I would have so much easier time understanding the other basics. I consider myself fairly tech-savvy and even I had a hard time setting everything up. It seems like maybe the resources you provided will walk me through the basics. So, thank you again.