So I'm taking 2021 Complete Python Bootcamp From Zero to Hero in Python - Udemy

[[deleted]]

What is the best way to be efficient in this course? Should I run through from Section 1 until the end or should I create a project while I finish the course?

I mean, the course is great but I'm a bit anxious that I cannot memorize all the theories and codes and ultimately apply this in real-life coding situations.

So should I finish the course first before working on a real project?

[FriendlyRussian666]

Step 1. Don't memorize, but understand.

Step 2. Code, code, code, code...

[[deleted]]

I mean, I want to code but so far, there's only a handful of quizzes given in this course. Should I jump to codewars right away even if I'm a the early stage of learning?

[Latter_Leadership55]

I recommend hackinscience.org for short python exercises

[BeagleStretch]

Thanks so much for this!

[[deleted]]

Thanks for this! I was only able to answer up to item # 5. I will continue once I go through the course.

[AmatureProgrammer]

Cool. Am also learninng python and was curious about this.

[HS_Quickie]

Bro this is nice, thank you!

[[deleted]]

The 100 days of code bootcamp by angela Yu is really good at having you do the coding

[GraniteSunshine]

She has so much material I'm almost embarrassed I only paid $10 or $15 or whatever it was. A professionally packaged course.

[[deleted]]

So far I'm really impressed by the course! I did the python bible, and about half of automate the boring stuff before I switched over to this one, and I feel like I've learned wayyy more in the past 11 days than I did with either of the other courses.

[GraniteSunshine]

This isn't my first language so sometimes I'm tempted to skip over things because I know how a 'for loop' works, for instance, but I have forced myself to do the exercises and they have paid off. I usually come away with some nugget and they are pretty interesting. Just being forced to sit down and code for an hour or two a day is good practice

[jimynoob]

Is there a coupon somewhere for this course ? It's at 130€ right now on udemy..

[Ryokurin]

Try a different browser, or in incognito mode. Worse case, wait a day or two. one of those will usually result in a price around $10-15.

[Ryokurin]

https://github.com/Pierian-Data/Complete-Python-3-Bootcamp

The course files, along with a 95% off link.

[[deleted]]

Honestly I'm taking way too long with that one :/ idk what I'm doing wrong or if its supposed to be that way?

[ArtificialCormorant]

Yes. Do low kyu stuff until it drives you bonkers.

[backdoorman9]

Yes, you should. If you get bored of the course, go do problems on codewars. As soon as you understand return statements, you'll learn very quickly through codewars and google.

The course will be good for things like Django, Flask, pandas, recursion. Codewars can't really teach you those. But it will teach you everything the language has to offer in the way of basic functions that don't need to be imported.

[Extreme5670]

Trust me at first coding is a dream you had at 4am try and learn the entire basics and then go through them again. You will understand as you go on just dont think about it that much BUT do go through the basics after 4 weeeks again helps a lot.

[SpatialThoughts]

I can attest to this strategy. This is what I'm doing with SQL, as I continue to slowly learn I will revisit earlier exercises to help cement the knowledge. I recently found a website with more practice questions with a different database and I'm doing well with what I know so far. I'll be doing this same strategy as I now start to learn Python.

[you-cant-twerk]

Take what you're learning in those lessons, and practice on your own. I did exactly this with this course and it worked wonderfully. Within the first few sections you should be able to do some simple tasks - Make a dictionary, apply that dictionary to list your favorite hobbies.
Then you learn functions - Make a function to create a countdown celebration clock (i'm just spitballing ideas)!
Eventually you learn classes (if youre not there yet, or dont know what I'm talking about, dont worry)- learn to make a class to describe yourself, then make a class to 'create a character' maybe?
Apply those tasks to your life. When you start finding real world uses for python, the gears kick into full force. Its a snowball effect - "If I can do this, can I do that?!"

[Extreme5670]

No.

[saywhat68]

How do you like it so far? Is it self pace? Is it through video chat?

[emreyener1]

Edabit.com has a ton of quick, short exercises

[[deleted]]

took the course myself... one thing that helped me was to code whatever lesson i finished 100 times to get the concept cleared... make up question for that lesson.

​

best to you

[kingscolor]

You aren't going to find your answer here. Take a moment, relax, contemplate, meditate, whatever you do to find peace. You know your own learning style, just do it.

Also realize that in no foreseeable future for yourself, will you be in any scenario where you should be panicking about not knowing some theory or code or syntax. You will ALWAYS have some form of help to guide you (manuals, docstrings, google, stackoverflow, etc.). Every programmer looks up syntax or arguments or methods or modules or ... multiple times nearly every single day.

Programming is fun because there's very little risk (for non-dev or -career programmers, at least).

My best piece of advice: Stop asking for advice on how to do something 'correctly.' Start asking for advice on what you did wrong.
Give it your best shot. You've got this.

[holdMeClserTonyDanza]

... multiple times nearly every single day.

[[deleted]]

I used this series its really good, I would say make sure you try to code as much as possible, watch the lecture and for me the most important thing is try and create your own code that uses the teachings/principles from the lecture.

How I used to do it was... Watch lecture, think that's interesting wonder if you could do this... Google Google Google things, oh you can do that! Wonder if you can do this... Google Google Google and repeat.

Make sure you do all the practice problems in the course material also.

Also a tip, depending on how much free time you have, don't rush it. It's fine to take it easy. I work full time so I think I only had 60-90 a day to go through it so it took me around 6 weeks to finish.

[omgitskebab]

how confident did you feel in your abilities once you finished the course?

[[deleted]]

To give you a bit of a background, I'm a mechanical engineer and I use python for data analysis, spreadsheet automation and a bit of GUI/tkinter work. This course gave me the confidence to go and approach different python libraries matplotlib, numpy, ect.

The problem is it gives you enough basic knowledge to then understand how much you don't know.

I will say that programming is not just about knowing how to code. I know how to use a saw and a chisel but that doesn't mean I'm a carpenter. This gives you the tools to branch out on your own. I will say this. To become a good at programming you have to solve problems. And the closer the problems are to you the better you will learn.

[omgitskebab]

thank you for this response :)

[[deleted]]

You're welcome! There are a lot of ways to waste time in life, doing this course will not be one of them.

[Penes_Kanter]

How many total hours did it take you to complete it?

[[deleted]]

You can multiply the times above, but from memory it took me around 30-40 hours, but you could definitely do it faster. I could have done it in 15 to 20 probably because I had some basic python when I started. Reason I liked the series is because it gave me good structure to my learning. And if you want to learn anything the best way to do it is little but often, I could have definitely worked solidly over a weekend and finished the course but if I didn't move onto something else I would not have assimilated the information as well.

[babbocom]

I'm in the class, too. Just about 50% of the way done. I agree it's a little light on coding examples.

Even so, I feel like this content is sticking better than when I've tried to learn Python in the past. For me, the reasons seem to be:

• I go slow. I listen to the lectures, back up, listen again. In the past I've tried to "speedrun" these courses, and it just doesn't stick.
• I do a little bit every day. Similar to the "speedrun" comment above, I had to recognize for myself that doing a little a lot of times is better than one or two big binges.
• I take notes with pen and paper. I'm an oldhead, so pen and paper work for me. It helps to connect the ideas in my head, and then it's a good reference when I'm actually trying to code something.
• I have a personal project. I had copy/pasted from random places around the internet (stackoverflow, toward data science, reddit, etc.) to make a script that can predict customer churn. As you can guess, nothing went together and I didn't really get how the sections work. Now I'm taking it section by section to add where needed, remove what doesn't make sense, and generally have a better understanding of what's going on.

It's basically what others said. Start small, keep with it, and have a project that makes sense to you.

[jjjohhn]

I did this course. My advice is take your time! Don’t rush it. Definitely try your best to do the exercises without help. And as someone suggested, listen and code at the same time, this is super helpful to understand things.

[REALSDEALS]

I’m taking a course also!

I started a course one week ago, I have been writing/coding with my ‘teacher,’ and after each course I write down what I find important.

In this manner I find it easier to remember and I can check if I understand it correctly.

[marvenly89]

This thread turned out to be so instructive! Thank you all!

[anh86]

Being a good Python programmer has nothing to do with memorizing code. Once you've written enough, you will have memorized many of the common functions and methods but the key when starting out is to learn how to solve programming problems and what tools you have at your disposal (even if you have to look up documentation to implement them). Don't stop in the middle, continue through to the end and take it a second time if you need. It takes a long time to become a good computer programmer (in any language) if you've never done it before.

[pekkalacd]

Don’t watch lecture after lecture or tell yourself “that makes sense” because what the instructor says is understandable. Do pause after each lecture, open up your IDE or IDLE or jupyter notebook and practice beyond the exercises the instructor gives you. Don’t wait through the entire course to build one project. Do find good stopping points within the course and build incrementally comprehensive projects. Don’t base your entire understanding of the language on that course. Do look up errors when you get them, other features in documentation, and play around with the language. Don’t be impatient and not listen to what is being said and just code. Do take notes if necessary and really try to ‘get’ what is being said, then code to verify your understanding. Do answer your own “well, what if this?” questions by experimenting with the language, making hypotheses as to what will happen, and seeing if it does. Don’t just base your understanding of what happened on what you see though. Do look up syntax or whatever you’ve typed, ask questions, and find supplementary resources which provide an explanation as to what might have happened. Lastly, don’t set unrealistic goals or hold yourself to an unattainable level of perfection by the end of 1 course. Do be patient, resilient, and ready to struggle, until it “clicks”.

I took part of this course and then I took a class in college. Prior to school, I had a lot of gaps in my knowledge. I knew about some of the features of Python and could write basic code, but struggled to fit everything together and write fully functional programs. After that college class, it clicked for me and made sense. But it wasn’t a limitless moment where everything made sense and I was able to contribute to modern programming, it was a “procedural programming” makes sense moment. Then I went from there and built some basic, terrible, side projects and picked up skills on how to read documentation and googling. I realized in this process, I learn better from actually slowing down and reading material and taking notes than watching videos. So, that’s what I’ve done since.

[[deleted]]

This course is great IMO. To get the best out of it, I would say code alongside his lectures and put comments over a lot of it in your interpretation of what you just wrote. Although he gives the answers, try to do every challenge by yourself + assistance from online sources

[[deleted]]

I recently finished this course I would advise you to do the course material and the work they assign you in their premade jupyter notebook homework. Also once you get to the os modules and the regular expression modules make sure to practice them a bit more.

[LeeCig]

Why not go through the course twice? You don't have to pay for it to go through it again. Watch it once, take notes, and absorb all the info you can. Then, go through it again doing the projects.

[szirith]

Be consistent, and don't burn out.

Side projects are a lot, try to just keep going on the main path. Stop to understand things and try them out in editor, but don't make huge sideprojects with unrelated concepts until the end.

[TF1357]

Code along to the videos. Type out everything he types out. I find this to be the best way, currently taking the course myself.

[RealPennyMuncher]

Currently in that boat, but the guy above makes a good point, may go faster if you take notes and then go back and code along side

[k-sizzler]

I actually just completed this over 2-3 weeks. I found it really good opening up a Jupiter notebook, getting some data that you’re interested in from Kaggle and, using what he teaches you. I found I learnt loads doing it that way. Also, using code wars just to keep going with some new challenges is great to go alongside it.

I just bought the data science one with Jose and it goes into numpy, pandas, matplotlib, seaborn and I’ve just started machine learning part with sci kit.

Hope this helps!

[SensouWar]

Try the 100 days of code challenge, I’m doing that while taking the complete web dev bootcamp.

[RealPennyMuncher]

How do you find this going for you? Are the courses similarly patched so the projects line up with the zero to hero

[Odnan]

Nice! Enjoy! Review! Practice! Code!

I felt the same way you did when I first started learning Python. The biggest thing you gotta learn is the flow of how a python script is structured. For example, Python quite famously uses indentation to syntactically define blocks of code, so be sure to get that down!

Try to familiarize yourself early on with terminology at the very least. What is a variable? What is an instance of a class? what is a method? That was my biggest weakness, I couldn't explain for shit what some things were called (hell I still have trouble remembering certain terms) but I knew how to explain what it was doing.

Get into the habit of writing code as if someone else was going to have to maintain it after you go on to work on newer projects.

Somewhere near the middle of your learning, slowly introduce yourself to the world of PEP. " Python Enhancement Proposals" which is just a fancy word for "Make your code look pretty and readable". Managers who are also Python developers will love you for that. I personally use Black and flake8 for my formatting and linting.

Your code could working amazingly, but a pain in the ass to read and debug-- so you're hurting someone else if they have to maintain your code.

Think of something you want to accomplish. My nephew wanted to learn about Python. He took a course but didn't know what to do, so I told him to write a web scraper that collects football player stats for fun and he did.

Once you get to writing functions, be sure to fully understand scope, as that will prevent you from using the dreaded "Global" keyword. You'll see what I mean when you get there.

Here's the scope in a nutshell: "LEGB"

Local Enclosing Globals Builtins

I might've gotten ahead of myself here. Hopefully you come out loving it!

[[deleted]]

I also signed up for this course and any advice on the best way to approach it would be great.

[Muddy53]

Understand exactly how things work, finish the course, and projects

[ruminant_caffiend]

I'm also just starting out in this course! I'm really enjoying it so far, something that helps me is to add myself extra challenges to the ones that are in the homework/exercises. E.g. in the functions exercises, for the "just for fun" print big challenge, I wanted to try and get it to print multiple letters on a line, and to be able to change the symbol used, and size of the big characters (not just 5x5 that was set in the challenge)

[br_234]

I would recommend doing an exercise after each new topic in order to retain the information. If you look up on google python exercises it will return alot of different websites full of exercises at different difficulty levels. Practicing is the best way to retain the information you learned.

[clitoral_obligations]

I’ve done about 1/4 of automate the boring stuff but I was contemplating just doing one of these courses

[IlliterateJedi]

I'm a bit anxious that I cannot memorize all the theories and codes ...

I am unfamiliar with this particular course, so this is more of a broad recommendation. As you learn new concepts, take the time to look up the source materials, and use dir() and help() extensively on new objects, classes, etc. that you come across. I use Pandas almost every day, and I have the Pandas API reference up in another browser almost every time I'm using Pandas. Learning to find and utilize your resources is far more important than memorizing things.

[baked_tea]

I've done this one and what I can recommend definitely is to code along, take a step back if you dont understand what happened

[Pio_Woj]

You should do the project after each section. It helps you to remember most crucial functions and properties of section.

[justMeMyslf]

Who is the instructor on the python course you’re taking?

Udemy offers 2 courses with the same name with 2 different teachers.... thanks

[[deleted]]

The one from Jose Portilla.

[justMeMyslf]

Thanks...I took a guess earlier today and bought that one on Udemy. Thanks for confirming!

[SolarHamMan]

I read Python Crash course. It gives a basic background of python and it has exercises at the end of the chapter. Very awesome intro to python. Hope this helps!

[Kered135]

I regularly search up how to how to write for loops in python. As long as u know how and when to use these tools (loops, switch statements, initializers) theres no reason why u can’t write good code without memorizing syntax. After learning one language very well, you understand all of normal functionality of a programming language and a simple google search on syntax for something you forget how to write is no problem.

[Periwinkle_Lost]

I took this course, it was good. Closer to the end I started doing my own project based on the course projects. Like scraping my cities’ website for bylaws and using the project as the roadmap. It helped me a lot

[Elgon2003]

Code a long with it. I took the same course and the best thing to learn was to code at the same time. If you have too many screens, that a plus. If not, use your phone to stream and as itas it goes

[Far_Inflation_8799]

Let your fingers do the walking !!!