How did you learn Python?

[Eric Pederson]

"Shawn Milo" wrote:

> My point is, I don't want something that is going to explain the 
> basic
> programming concepts, but does give a good introduction to 
> Python-specific
> things. 


I think you might appreciate "Learning Python" as it's written very succinctly, but it goes through the language features pretty comprehensively.  Very nicely written.  Afterwards, the "Python Cookbook" might be useful, you can dip into it and discover better ways to do certain things, as you do them.  Either book should be read next to the computer with IDLE open, IMO.  The interpreter really makes learning by doing easy.

I have not heard of a great Python design patterns type book, but you will see discussion of the essence of that subject on this list every day: advice on how to write more "Pythonic" code, how to design code that runs faster, and even just "how do I accomplish this?" answers.

Having a project to code may be one of the best tools for learning python.

Python code is cleaner by nature, and will encourage + facilitate "cleaner code think" if you let it.

Definitely read some of the materials on the Python.org site, by Guido et. al.  
 
Introductions:  http://python.org/doc/Intros.html
Topic specific:  http://python.org/topics/
FAQs:  http://python.org/doc/faq/general.html


Have fun!


Eric Pederson

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