Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Beginner to Competent in Python: How would you approach it?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 23 posts

Ask HN: Beginner to Competent in Python: How would you approach it?

#1

Post by surds »

Hello fellow HN users,

I expect to start a job soon where the main backend language is Python, with parts of Ruby and RoR in the stack. I have been a Ruby dev and have a beginner-level familiarity with Python - having read more than written.

How should I go about increasing my competency in the language to a decent level as fast as possible. I am talking about general fluency and knowledge about Python and not specific to the tech stack of the company.

I am sure there are excellent Python devs here and also devs who had to ramp up on the language for their job. As such, I thought I should get some guidance from the community.

Appreciate all opinions and pointers!

Re: Ask HN: Beginner to Competent in Python: How would you approach it?

#6

Post by asicsp »

* Python Distilled by Dave Beazley - "this concise handbook focuses on the essential core of the language, with updated code examples to illuminate how Python works and how to structure programs that can be more easily explained, tested, and debugged"

* Fluent Python by Luciano Ramalho — "takes you through Python’s core language features and libraries, and shows you how to make your code shorter, faster, and more readable at the same time"

I have more such Python resources here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/py_resources/intermediate.h...

Re: Ask HN: Beginner to Competent in Python: How would you approach it?

#8

Post by livinglist »

I think it has always been the case that practice makes perfect. If you want to be good at it, use it, start writing some personal projects, read source code of popular projects using python, learn best practices during the process and correcting yourself along the way.

Re: Ask HN: Beginner to Competent in Python: How would you approach it?

#9

Post by ktpsns »

I find REPLs and IDEs a great way for learning the libraries and APIs by exploration.

Install iPython (the command line, not the notebook interface. The CLI is simpler). Install the libraries you will work with in your new software stack. Read the manuals, do the "hello worlds". Then type some variable and a question mark afterwords. This will show the documentation. Two question marks show the actual code of a particular function in question. This is great for digging around in the libraries. Many IDEs such as PyCharm have similar options when you have code and can navigate all the way down the rabbit hole in the libraries.

For many libraries in python, this attemp is not so useful. For instance, numpy delegates much work to actual C code and a lot of magic is involved.

Generally, Python has rather few specific syntax, compared to other languages. The language is rather small and you will spend more time on the libraries then on learning the actual language.

Post reply on HN