Learning to program in Python

[Adam]

jbchua wrote:

> Hello everybody.
>
> I am an Electrical Engineering major and have dabbled in several
> languages such as Python, C, and Java in my spare time because of my
> interest in programming. However, I have not done any practical
> programming because I have no idea where to get started. I taught
> myself these languages basically by e-tutorials and books. This makes
> me feel as if I don't really know how to implement these languages.
> Does anybody have any advice on where to start applying my limited
> knowledge practically in order to advance my learning?

I am just starting to learn to program as well. (In my spare time.) The
advice about deciding on a goal, a project to work on, is good.

I have just got through the basics section in this guide here
(http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld/), which I found very
useful for beginners and the address book example you build up shows
the python in practice.

Once I had learnt about file inp/out I decided to make a program that
would split a file in half for email and then could be used to join
them together again. This helped me get used to most of what I had
learnt in the beginner section.

Also don't forget the Python.org documentation it's very helpful and is
a great companion to most the 3rd party tutorials around.