[Tutor] Learn Python

[Goran Ikac]

I'm a newbie in Python, too. A year ago, I started from zero, and I
collected some bad, but much more nice experiences.Bad first: there are
many (much too many) web sites offering Python tutorials for beginners,
most of them for free. Be careful! Some of them are not worth your time,
some are didactically bad, some are actually dead (no response to your
questions or progress) but still expecting money for a certificate at the
end of the course (not much money, thrue, but I dislike to be tricked that
way).
Now nice:
 • Once I discovered the book "Practical Programming" 3rd Ed (Gries,
Campbell & Montojo 2017) , I actually started to learn effectively.
 • On the site https://realpython.com/ I found a lot of good lessons and
advice. Most of their material is not free, but everything you need to
start learning is free. The team working on site takes its job very
seriously, they are very professional and I honestly recommend a visit.
 • There is a guy, Trey Hunner, helping a lot not to lose a right way in
the Pythonic jungle. You'll soon learn that "There should be one - and
preferably only one - obvious way to do it." (The Zen of Python by Tim
Peters) simply doesn't hold the ground in Python, so Trey's advice will be
of much help. Google!
 • Once you start writing some code, you'll have some real questions for
the old wolves at "Tutor Digest". Then ask, and - in my experience - they
will put some serious time and effort into answering.
And one from my humble opinion: learn basis, learn syntax, but remember
that all the books and tutorials for the newbies base their lessons on
functional programming. However, it seems that the object oriented approach
is the skill we need to master before we can say we know anything actually.
Once, we all shall need to learn OOP!
Finally, practice, practice, practice, and don't lose faith!
Good luck, and happy pythonning!
Goran from Croatia