[Tutor] Re: newbie looking to avoid bad habits

[Alex Newby]

Hi Brian,

You may find the PEPS on python-style useful
http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0000.html
Python tends to take care of a lot of good style for you, indentation,
etc.

Hygiene isn't my forte (kidding ;-)

Sincerely,

Alex Newby
http://alexnewby.com

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 11:58:37 -0500
From: Brian van den Broek <bvande at po-box.mcgill.ca>
Subject: [Tutor] newbie looking to avoid bad habits
To: Tutor at python.org
Message-ID: <403E25BD.7020602 at po-box.mcgill.ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed

Hi all,

I am a Python newbie and haven't done any programing at all in 
over 10 years. My limited previous experience is with BASIC. Once 
I took a course, I found that after having programmed in BASIC on 
my own for a few years that I'd managed to pick up many bad habits 
in code structure, etc. Unfortunately, this was all long enough 
ago that the details are lost. I do know that I tended to produce 
ugly, kludgey code that worked. Working is good; pretty and 
working is better.

I've not been using Python long enough to acquire any habits, good 
or bad. I've looked through the links on python.org and some other 
sources, too. There is plenty available. What I need is a 
recommendation to narrow all of that down. Could be something 
fairly short, though longer is OK too. Web better than paper, but 
paper OK too.

I'm looking for something that addresses style, preferably from a 
relative newcomers perspective. I've been using the second ed. of 
Learning Python. Very good book, but so far (100 pp in) it doesn't 
quite meet these desiderata. And, while I've order Python in a 
Nutshell sight unseen, I'd be surprised if it did either.

The best resource on these issues that I have found so far is "How 
to Think Like a Computer Scientist". But, while that seems a very 
good book for its audience, the pace is slow enough for me to make 
reading for the occasion style nugget a bit painful. I am a 
technical guy (I'm a philosopher working in philosophy of math and 
logic) with little computer application experience, so I can take 
a book for grown-ups, though not one for the cognoscenti.

Recommendations for reading are my primary aim, but if anyone has 
anything to say to a newbie about 'hygiene' I'd read that 
gratefully too ;-)

Thanks and best

Brian van den Broek




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