[Tutor] IDLE question

[Alan Gauld]

> Hi there to all. I;m new to programming and new to Python, 
> a friend of mine recommended me to start to learn whit this.

He (or she) is quite right! :-)

> I want to know if when writting an instruction and get an 
> error message the IDLE gets you to "another sentence" starting 
> with the ">>>" you have to write everything all over again 
> or if you can keep going whit the things you were doing?

It depends. In principle you will have all of the variables 
you have created still in place. And you can just retype the 
bit that failed, however in practice it can sometimes be hard 
to know whats still around. You can find out by just printing 
the values from the >>> prompt.

> I was copying the "Animals" script to start.

Sorry I don't know what you mean? Where is this animals 
script?

>  P.S. any tips on self learning?

First go through Danny Yoo's IDLE tutorial - found from the 
IDLE subsection of the Python website

Then go to the intro page for non programmers and pick one 
of the tutorials there. If you want to learn about 
programming per se then pick either How To Think Like a 
Computer Scientist, or my tutor. If you just want a fast 
track way to learn Python programming pick Josh Caglieri's(sp??) 
tutor. (There are a few more now and I can't comment on the others.)

Now try to write a program of your own, maybe one of the 
excercises on the Useless Python web site...

Once you have completed one of those move onto the official 
tutor that comes with Python, it will fill in the gaps left 
out by the beginers tutorials.

Now you should be ready to try something serious :-)

Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web tutor
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld