Beginners and experts (Batchelder blog post)

[Leam Hall]

On 09/28/2017 04:15 AM, Paul Moore wrote:
> With Python, I'd say that an appreciation of the available libraries
> is key - both what's in the stdlib, and what's available from PyPI.
> That's not to say you should memorise the standard library, but rather
> cultivate an approach of "hmm, I'm pretty sure I remember there being
> a library for that" and going to look. The best way of getting this is
> to actually work with code - you can start with doing coding projects
> of your own (it's *always* a good exercise to have a problem that
> interests you, and work on coding it - no matter what it is, you'll
> learn more about understanding requirements, testing, bug fixing, and
> practical programming by working on a project you care about than
> you'll ever get reading books) and/or you can look at existing open
> source projects that you're interested in, and offer help (there's
> always a bug tracker, and typically some simpler items - and you'll
> learn a lot from interacting with a larger project).


When I first started in Unix/Linux there was a group called SAGE. They 
had a list of tasks a system admin was expected to be able to do and 
they sorted the list by "Junior", "Senior", or somesuch. I started at 
the bottom of the list and worked my way up.

One useful thing was to make a sorted list of commands in /usr/bin, 
/bin, /usr/sbin, and /sbin, and then read the first bit of the man page 
that showed what the command did. Fun stuff.

Leam