After completing my installation in the last article, I have since been able to concentrate on learning Python itself. There are so many tutorials and courses on Python that it is overwhelming. It took me a while until I found a starting point that was a good fit for me.
This post is part of my journey to learn Python. You can find the other parts of this series here.
Resources on Python.org
The first stop to learn Python should be the Beginner’s Guide to Python. Depending on your existing knowledge of programming, you may start with the non-programmer part or jump directly to part of people knowing other programming languages. In either part, you get a lot of helpful links and resources to learn Python. If you find a tutorial that you like, stop looking any further and start with that.
Pluralsight
Pluralsight does not only have many curses on Python, they even have a learning path with 9 courses for Python:
Paths combine specific courses and tools into one experience to teach you any given skill from start to finish. Paths are aligned to an individual’s knowledge level, to help you and your team develop the right skills in the right order.
Manning
If you prefer books, you should check the offerings at Manning.com. If you search for Python, you find 30 books covering a wide range of things you can do with it. Do not use the category filter for Python, this will only show you 6 outdated books and you miss out all the new things.
My pick: Python: Getting Started
After a few attempts with various tutorials, I finally settled for the Pluralsight path and started with Python: Getting Started by Bo Milanovich. This course is 3 hours long and covers not only the basic parts of Python, but also explains debugging, virtual environments and how to distribute standalone executables of your program.
Useful tools
PythonChecker is a great help to write syntactically correct Python. This tool checks the syntax of your code and gives hints on how to improve it:
Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, visualizations and narrative text:
FizzBuzz
To put my newly gained knowledge to a test I did the FizzBuzz (or FooBarQix) Kata. After a few bits of optimization (like the combined else if) it now looks like this:
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def fizz_buzz(value): if(value % 3 == 0 and value % 5 == 0): return "FizzBuzz" elif (value % 3 == 0): return "Fizz" elif(value % 5 == 0): return "Buzz" else: return value for i in range(1, 101): print(fizz_buzz(i)) |
Next
I took a lot of notes in this week that I want to put into executable code. For that, I should learn about unit testing and spend some more time with the Jupyter Notebook.
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