At first I thought I’d follow along the MIT OCW 6.0001 course, but it’s like eight years old and on a far outdated version of Python and Anaconda. When I tried to install the software as per the syllabus’s instructions, I found the download links were dead. I had to spend a few hours going through archives to get the required Anaconda 4.1.1 and Python 3.5 only for it to not even work upon installing. When I tried opening the Anaconda navigator, the logo would pop up, it would say initializing, and then it would just crash before it could launch. Referring back to the syllabus was of no help because the instructions there were literally as brief as “Install Anaconda and Python 3.5 via the installer”.
I wasn’t able to troubleshoot any of this because all the google results for this question were full of jargon I sure as shit won’t be able to understand until I finish the course in the first place. I have no idea what an IDE is, what a pip is, what a spyder is, what a path variable is, or why one would want to use the command prompt.
I was actually able to successfully install the newest versions, but I can’t use these for the course because I’m an absolute beginner who has no frame of reference for what differences are actually going to be important.
Now I’m in the process of looking elsewhere. Problem is, I can’t find anything like the MIT OCW course. I really loved the videos of actual lectures and the fact that I didn’t have to enroll or sign in to anything. There exist a lot of Python tutorials on the internet, but I was hoping to also get an introduction to computer science in general because I need to learn the fundamentals of the subject. I’d like to have a deeper understanding than one would get by just learning a computer language without any of the theory behind it.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a more recent curriculum? Ideally I’d love it to have lecture videos, but I’ll be content with just problem sets and a good textbook if it’s up to date and has a robust step by step guide for setting up.
Me as a beginning programmer: “I’m going to learn how to do things the right way!”
Me as a professional programmer: “it was my first time using the language so made it from stitching together 3 tutorials. Don’t ask me how it works but it passed qa”
Check out this site: https://learnpythonthehardway.org/python3/preface.html
Project Euler is a good resource for language-agnostic computer science problems at all levels. It won’t do anything for getting a python environment set up, but it gives you problems to chew on in whatever language and environment you have.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll keep it in mind. Unfortunately I don’t have any language or environment at all right now, so I’ll need to figure out how to take care of that first.
You can play around with something like a web based python interpreter for now and worry about all that later, once you understand better what you’re trying to do.
I used Wing IDE when I was in compsci 101 and 102. I don’t know why they picked that one over any others. They gave us a list of problems that was called something like 14 simple problems? It basically looked like a shortened version of a lot of these ones: https://www.w3resource.com/python-exercises/python-conditional-statements-and-loop-exercises.php Theres also Kattis for loads of programming problems.
Learning programming is such a, like, binary thing. Cause you always get the people who just get it and learn by doing and trying and failing, and then you have people who need lecture and guidance. Neither is bad. If you’re the second half I can’t really help because I was the first kind lol. I’m sure there’s plenty of MOOCs (just online learning basically with videos and homework) besides MITs one. I searched for python moocs and this came up https://programming-23.mooc.fi/ I can’t vouch for it but it’s something (they have lecture vids at the bottom). Harvard has a basic intro compsci course as well but they do C++ or C, can’t recall, and they might be too outdated now. I know you have your heart set on python but a lot of people swear by the old Harvard videos, I dunno.
Thanks for the advice and resources. The most effective way I learn tends to be in the middle of those two categories. I like to be walked through the basics and fundamentals and given curated problem sets. But once I do those and have a feel for the main idea, I start experimenting on my own until I get stuck and return to the structured set up.
By the way, I don’t actually have my heart set on python, I just chose that because it was what the MIT OCW course was using. I’m not going to be doing that course now that I’ve realized how out of date it is, so I’m now considering either C++ or C instead. That said, I’d still like to to learn Python regardless, but I’m not sure if it should be my first language given the advice I received here.
I program with python on and off. Its good.
I created a blank folder of py projects would build one after another. I would literally just type “python ____ project” or “python ___ tutorial” into youtube and follow along (sometimes I found blog tutorials to work from also). Starting with the most quick n simple projects, then the bigger more complex ones. This way I was quickly writing and completing new programs. Some projects I never finished but implemented useful code and learned new stuff from. This way felt I was making progress, making finished programs, and advancing. I made little math programs, games, geometry, graphical tests, etc. Some programs I could complete in hours then spend time refining them. Others i spent days coding, testing, debugging. I also watched general python related lectures just to get the bigger picture around it all.
i use pycharm for testing shit. pycharm is an ide, an all in one software with code editor, debugger, compiler etc. python has packages which are contain other people’s open source code, pip can be used to get these packages for your own use. for example requests is a package for requesting stuff from web servers and can be used for scraping. spyder is an ide similar to pycharm and path variable is a location containing binary files so lets say python3 is located in C:\Program Files\Python\bin, you will have to cd (change directory) to that location to access it but with path variable set to that path whenever you open command prompt and type in “python3” it automatically understands to look for python3 in that folder without having to cd. command prompt is used to run python scripts because you need to specify to python interpreter which script you need to run and you can’t do that with gui.
for code snippets i recommend stackoverflow and chatgpt. you can ask chatgpt to make simple scripts (complex ones may have errors) with explanations. read the code and try to understand it instead of blindly copy pasting it.
I considered this approach, but I’d much prefer something more structured and guided as in a college course. I’m not really looking to make even very simple programs yet. I’d first like to get a handle of the theory and fundamentals of what computer science and programming even are in general, how to use the tools Anaconda comes with to compose programs, and the basic techniques for writing programs. Not to mention learning what all of that jargon is I mentioned in the post.
The tricky thing is, the fundamentals of computer science don’t actually have much of anything to do with setting up or using programming tools, or even with the basic techniques for writing programs.
Right, but I was hoping to get them both in one course in order to understand how the tools work and what the programs themselves are actually doing beneath the abstraction.
Python might not be the best language to learn a lot of those things, because python hides them for usability. Python really is a “try to make it before you really know how” kind of language. Python is also not the language I would want to learn object oriented programming on.
JavaScript would be a little better, in that regard. but I struggled to learn any programming until I learned something with stricter typing: C then Java. Python legit confused me as a beginner, because I couldn’t tell what was happening. Idk maybe its just me.
I initially decided on Python because that was the language the MIT OCW course was using, but since I’m not going to be doing that course, I’m willing to choose a different language. The only thing is I’ve heard C is much harder for a beginner to learn than Python is, but if you could suggest any good books written for beginners, I’d give it a try.
