[Tutor] List exercise

[Michael Janssen]

On Sat, 8 Feb 2003 Anwar.Lorenzo@gmx.net wrote:

> Anyway do you guys think that "Thinking Like a Computer
> Scientist:Learning with Python" is the best tutorial for an absolute
> beginner?

I prefer writing little real world programs just after getting a glimps on
the language core (Chapter 2 of the Python Library Reference to name it).
In your case I would assume, you already got enough of the core (hey, you
know to define functions - i had to rewrite my first script to put
everything into functions :-).

I strongly believe that the world isn't short of relativly simple real
problems/ tasks. I believe you can put them with python to a
useful solution with your thought just on the problems (instead on syntax
issues). This way you learn how to think like those computer guys by need.

This way you will very probably write code which isn't that good looking
even to yourself after you have more experience. On the other side, hey:
my first-week-script is yet running and does it useful job!

I have learned how to use dictionary three month after I have started
programming because I must learn *why* to use them: A script of mine
(mis)uses lists and runs incredibly slow. Oh, I've read one or two
tutorials and I've read about dictionarys but they seemed to me hard to
fill, hard to handle and hard to get items from it back. So I forget them
and a perl programmer had to advise me to use "hash arrays" - tooks me an
hour to translate this into "dictionary" and I have to relecture the
tutorials about dictionarys and the outcome was: my script did it's job in
seconds not ineffordable ten minutes. This feeling of "one problem
solved" can't be read in tutorials ;-)

Michael

>
> Thanks again!
> -Anwar
>
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