[Tutor] Python tutoring

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 10:44:56PM -0500, marcus douglas wrote:

> Hello, my name is Marcus Douglas and I'm a student at College of 
> Central Florida, I'm contacting you because this is my first year 
> programming and I'm seriously seeking some HELP...ASAP...

Hello Marcus, and welcome!

We hope that we can help you, but only if you ask us questions! What are 
you having trouble with? Please don't say "everything" :-)

Remember, we're not here to do your work for you, and your College 
almost certainly has rules about plagiarism and collaboration, so please 
try to ask generic questions about the language rather than specific 
questions about homework questions. If you must ask homework questions, 
expect that we'll only give you round-about answers that hint at a 
solution.

Good questions:

"What's a variable?"

"Can you explain exceptions? I don't understand them."

"I have a for-loop, and I want to exit it early. What should I do?"

"How do I look for an item in a list? I tried "find(my_list, item) but 
it printed NameError."

"What's the best way to read a file with items separated by tabs?"

"Here is my code. I tried running it, expecting this result, but got 
this different result instead. What did I do wrong?"


Bad questions:

"Help!?"

"Here's a project I have to do for my course. Solve it for me. 
Urgently. Because I forgot to do my project for the last three weeks 
and it's due tomorrow."

"Here's some code. It doesn't work. Fix it for me."

      

Good luck, and happy programming!



-- 
Steven