Good evening, everyone. I have, but one quick inquiry. What are the best resources in your opinion to learn python by yourself as a complete beginner? Thank you all
(Ignore the downvotes on this comment btw; I’ve obviously touched a nerve with Python developers.)
Depending on what you want to do I would consider learning JavaScript instead:
- You already have a JavaScript environment in your web browser (just press ctrl-shift-J).
- If you want to do anything web related you basically have to learn and use JavaScript .
- The Python tooling story is a complete disaster. If you want to spend all your time fight your tools Python is for you. Especially on Windows. JavaScript (which uses NPM) is not perfect but it is significantly better.
- It’s like 50x faster.
- Overall JavaScript (with Typescript anyway, which you can learn later) is a better language than Python. A notable exception is Python’s support of arbitrary precision integers. Using 64-bit integers in JavaScript is a right pain. But that won’t remotely be an issue for a beginner.
There are a couple of situations I would maybe pick Python:
- AI. For better or worse (it’s worse) the entire AI ecosystem is based around Python so you don’t really have much choice here if you want to do AI stuff.
- Scripts to automate integration of third party services. Generally more common for projects like AWS or whatever to provide Python libraries than JavaScript ones, so it can be easier in Python.
It really depends on what kind of projects do you want to do?
Overall JavaScript (with Typescript anyway, which you can learn later) is a better language than Python.
🤣🤣🤣
good one
Yes it is good because it’s completely true. Of course this question is going to attract a lot of Python developers who haven’t used Typescript and don’t know what they’re missing so I’m not surprised by this response.
Most Python developers still don’t even use static type hints. I guess partly because the Python tooling catastrophe makes it a quite a pain to set them up.
I guess partly because the Python tooling catastrophe makes it a quite a pain to set them up.
Salty huh
Saying you need to set up type hinting in Python shows that you’re the one assuming it’s a hassle like TS, where you need a different runtime to have access to something the language (JS) should have provided from the start.
Everything you need is provided by typing, which is included in a Python install. Just import it and start using it.
iPython makes experimenting in an interactive manner so easy, I use it every day.
Definitely my preference. However, for someone just starting (and not used to pressing TAB or calling help() ), an empty prompt might be intimidating.
That’s why I typically suggest interactive tutorials, e.g. any of these two: https://www.learnpython.org/en/Hello%2C_World! https://futurecoder.io/course/#IntroducingTheShell
Tutorial on python.org.
Certainly not the best, but codecademy is decent. After that, it should be enough for you to learn more deeply from official Python documentation, actual Python code base (from OSS repositories), and specific subjects from blog articles.
But it will highly depend on what type of content you like. For example some people may prefer books over interactive courses. If this is your case, i think this one is recognized as a very good one: https://learnpythonthehardway.org/python3/
I always recommend this one:
https://www.w3schools.com/python/default.asp
Because the topics are sorted, easy to find and bite sized.
