New Skills, Python, etc. : An Irritatingly Sincere Post
So I wanted to do something new that’s more left-brain-y and difficult [for me, at least] than what I mostly do for work, and decided to opt for programming. I’m attempting to learn Python via MIT’s Open Courseware Comp Sci courses, Google and general determination to crack something I don’t know how to do.
So here’s a newbie question for programmers: if you were starting from scratch as one of The Olds (which I am, vis-a-vis most people who learn Python as a starter language), what would you do? What would you read? How would you practice?
(I’m not guaranteeing that I won’t completely flake and drop this in two months, but I was trying to decide between this and some general mathematics stuff, and it seemed more practical.)
So what would you do?
Hello, Spiers. I should introduce myself. My name is Guillermo and I am a software engineer in a financial firm. I thought I was going to be an economist, but somehow this is where I ended up. I RSS your tumblr because I didnt want you to see a strange person in your followers. I started reading it because I used to read gawker and Balk is always referencing your posts.
What you are undertaking is not simple. Yes, programming is left-brainy and mathy sometimes, but it is really about language. It is about finding new or better ways to describe processes and problems. You need to decide what your aim is. Do you want to learn some basic phrases so you can get around in a strange place, or do you really want to learn the language? Learning a language is hard. Computer languages have their own syntax, semantics and morphology and you need to learn how to think in them. Don’t strive to learn the grammar of a language, learn how to think in terms of programming. Recognize patters. Think in loops and conditionals. Break things down to decission trees in your mind. Set the search bar in your browser to go direct to Wikipedia. Then, find a problem to solve.
If you really are just working towards some left-brain stimulation, try Project Euler. Other great ways to go are linked-list implementations and tree algorithms.
If you really want to learn how to write a program though, find yourself a project. Something ambitious, but not crazy. You might get side tracked or you might never finish it, but it’s not about the answer, it’s about the process. The number of “aha!” moments you will have after long nights of too much coffee and frustration just can’t be replicated.
Hope this helps.
