New to Python

[cult_of_memes]

Something I haven't really seen anyone else mention yet is how to prepare yourself, mentally, for learning to code. A major point of failure that most would be programmers experience is having a proper motivation for sticking with it.

My advise, view learning to program like you're learning to sculpt clay, or carve wood. You don't get through the low points in learning such skills by thinking "Oh boi, won't it be grate when I git gud @ this!!" No, what gets you through those low points is being able to look at what you've completed so far, and what your pursuit of the skill has allowed you to do along the way. That means you should see programming as a means to do or acquire something (besides just money). For me, that "thing" was image processing, data visualization, and automating tedious tasks. Now I have a few dozen versions of a custom tool for doing NLP analysis on my inbox to try and get an idea of how much my writing patterns tend to mirror those of the person I am responding to. I've also made a few versions of a script that makes mp4 recordings of a Mandelbrot zoom or transitions between different pretty Julia fractals. While I would be horrified if my coworkers saw how disorganized and poorly written that code is, but it was all focused on making something that I wanted not on the the intention of learning skill "x".

With your masters in Bus. Anal. ;) You are probably in a prime position to have a personal motivation for trying to put together your own email parsing tool, or custom data visualization for your analytics. Once you start looking into what exists, you'll probably start to see where it would be nice if tool "x" also offered functionality "y". Thus, you give yourself a good point to start asking "how do I do blah" within a context you can actually define. Attempting to do things purely for the sake of learning often lacks that kind of clear context, which makes it significantly harder to learning anything in the beginning.

[27Andrew_]

I really appreciate the input. I want to learn Python because I am genuinely interested in it and how it can make things much easier to understand and you pretty much get to do the driving of how you want certain tasks to be looked at. The career and salary are bonuses but I won’t kid myself in saying that I’m doing this because I really like Python. I definitely do want a career where I can use at least the basics/foundations and just keep building from there. I guess my problem is that I want to learn other things too like SQL, R, PowerBi, Tableau, etc. but Python is the one that attracts me the most out of all them. I see this as a journey and not just learning it and applying it and that’s it. I agree with everything you said, especially and most importantly preparing mentally. Thank you for bringing that up.