[omaha] Anyone up for spreading the gospel?

[Matthew Nuzum]

Don't let the fact that you don't have a formal python education deter you.
Get a good book to use as a resource and follow the outline in the book.
That will help you avoid forgetting important things and give you ideas on
the order things should be taught.

Honestly, many many teachers are not experts in the subject they're paid to
teach. The best teachers are enthusiastic and help you enjoy the material.
Having that can cover over a lot of other short-comings. And besides, you're
not giving them a diploma or college credit, you're just giving them the
initial push that will help some of them overcome the "getting started
sounds hard" inertia.

This may sound crazy, but one of the best books I've read lately is "Agile
development with Rails" (4th edition). The authors masterfully help you get
a quick success with the tool, then expose you to more and more of the bits
and pieces and, better than any book I've seen, help you develop good habits
by writing test and following conventions. (Rant: that book has you writing
tests before page 80, the Django book doesn't cover tests at all) You may
want to pop over to B&N and skim through it.

On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Matt Wynn <matt.wynn at gmail.com> wrote:

> Been lurking for a couple weeks, wanted to run something by all ya'll.
>
> I run a group called Hacks/Hackers. It's goal is to bring coders and
> journalists together. I swear, that's not as crazy as it sounds. Both
> groups
> have a sort of open-source ethos, where sharing (be it government
> information or code) is better than keeping secrets. And especially on the
> web side, I think there's a lot to be gained by putting folks from both
> pots
> -- content creators and folks who know how to use it -- together.
>
> At any rate, I have a grand plan of pulling off some sort of intro to
> Python
> class. A university has donated a computer lab, and it sounds like there's
> good interest -- not all from journalists. But after I laid the groundwork,
> it hit me that I'm totally unqualified to teach anyone anything about
> Python. I'm self-taught and work mostly with Django. I'm not even sure how
> to define a tuple to people, much less some of the intricacies.
>
> All of that is a stupidly roundabout way of getting to this: Would any of
> you fine folk be interested in leading/helping lead/coaching/mentoring a
> short (hour, maybe two) hands-on class for people who want to test this
> stuff out? Reply on the list or shoot something to me at
> matt.wynn at gmail.comif you want to get involved. I have some rough
> ideas of what I think the
> class should accomplish, but I'm not tied to anything.
>
> Back to your regularly-scheduled programming. Thanks for letting me ramble
> on.
>
> -Matt
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>



-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin and twitter

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -Thomas Edison