[Edu-sig] Suggestion for python learning

[David MacQuigg]

At 06:21 AM 7/10/2008 +0400, deepu john wrote:

>It would have been extremely useful to have an audiobook about python which one can listen to while sitting in a tram, waiting at a doctors office, walking on the treadmill, driving a car.... The same topics that will take about an hour to read through in a book can be listened through in 10 or 15 minutes.
>
>Hope someone will do it soon, that then python would become the only programming language that can be learnt by listening!

Can you really learn Python this way?  Try writing some code after listening to a verbal explanation only.  Even if you have amazing powers to visualize what you hear, the verbal description, even for something as simple as a for-loop, would be tedious.

There is a reason programming books are written the way they are - programming is a visual thing for most people, even a tactile thing, at least for me.  If I don't actually write some code, I quickly forget what I have just read.

That said, it would be nice to have more tutorials written for targeted audiences, like biological scientists.  A well-written tutorial integrates the code and words in a way that your thoughts are not disrupted by having to find an example buried in a complex figure on another page.  The best person to write a tutorial for biological scientists is a biological scientist who has just learned Python.  Go for it!!  I'll be glad to read and offer suggestions.

-- Dave