Any advice for a beginner?

[William Tanksley]

On 29 May 1999 20:43:53 -0500, Preston Landers wrote:
>"Simon Speichert" <spdl23 at hotmail.com> writes:

>> My point is this; it's a *huge* language, and I have no idea where to start.
>> I'm past "Hello, world!" and I don't know where to go next. Any advice would
>> be much appreciated.

>Well, I guess it all depends on what you want to do! :-)

Also, how far past "hello, world" are you?  The language itself isn't
huge, but the libraries available are truly gargantuan, and growing every
day.  If you want to learn all of them, just give up now ;-).

OTOH, if you're just trying to learn the language itself, the end is in
sight.

>Seriously, my advice to you is to identify some kind of project or
>goal and work towards it and learn Python along the way.

Agreed.  That way you'll not bore yourself with libraries which do things
you don't need.

>I can't really give you any suggestions for what to work on; that
>entirely depends on your temperment and desires.  Is there any kind of
>system administration problem you would like solved?  Recently I
>decided there wasn't a good facility for searching Debian's (Linux)
>availible package archives, so I wrote one.  (It's actually decently
>implemented.  I use it myself all the time but I haven't released it
>yet mainly because no one seems to have any interest. [hint hint])

A Debian search?  That's really cool!  I get annoyed only being able to
search through the names in dselect.

>---Preston

-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley
"But you shall not escape my iambics."
           -- Gaius Valerius Catullus