51–60 of 114 posts
My girlfriend asked me to teach her Python - she's doing her masters in statistics, so she's coming from an R/SAS background.
Apparently Python is useful to know in the investment banking arena, which surprised me.
It would be really interesting to sit someone down who is fairly comfortable surfing the web, answering emails, using iphoto or microsoft word, but who has never had any experience programming before, and see where they trip up and where they are bored in working through this. I know a few people I might be able to talk into it. If I do, I'll report back.
I'd like to hear his opinion on "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist", which (approximately) matches his description of a beginner's book, and uses python for the examples. http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english2e/
From my experience, the coolest thing to do when beginning is to work with a GUI because you really have the feeling to do something great (contrary to print hello in a terminal which is more than useless (from a novice point of view, of course)). So, my suggestion is to put a small bundle library with a main.py to modify and learn. For instance, that library could only show a simple dialog which you can draw and fun…
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For a long time the free online book to learn Ruby was "Why's Poignant Guide To Ruby." When you compare that to Dive into Python the choice is easy ;-)
I'm really wondering what will finally stop the Ruby vs. Python thing. It's getting old.
Either that or javascript becomes mainstream server side.
This is the way absolutely every book that aims to teach people a language should be written. When Ruby on Rails hit it big, I picked up two books and couldn't get past the first two chapters. Why? The first two chapters were filler chapters. The history of ruby, the history of taking application languages and putting them on the web. An entire quarter of the book in pages was full of back-story, it was chapter 4 bef…
Look forward to seeing where this goes. My girlfriend asked me to teach her Python - she's doing her masters in statistics, so she's coming from an R/SAS background. Apparently Python is useful to know in the investment banking arena, which surprised me.
But, tell your girlfriend that if she ends up working for a bank I will cry and take my book away from her. :-)
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No he trashed DiP first, and then was inspired to work on something better. I'm not thrilled with the way he expressed his dislike for DiP, but good on him for working on an alternative.
I agree. There's not many people who put their money where their mouth is. Regardless of how people feel about him personally, he's a very talented coder and has a lot of experience in this domain. I'm excited to see where this goes.
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"but my money is that most programmers learn Python as their nth language, where n > 2." Off the top of my head, I know at least 3 Universities (near me in Canada: UBC, SFU, UofC) that have recently switched to Python as the first language taught/used in their CS programs. There is a real demand for intro Python books. And IMHO Python is a pretty good first language.
MIT recently switched from Scheme to Python for their intro class
"If a programmer tells you to use vim or emacs tell them no. These editors are for when you are a better programmer. All you need right now is an editor that lets you put text into a file." Ha! When I started to program, everyone told me the opposite. After weeks of head scratching and spending more time learning editors than coding, I secretly switched to Pico. But man could I use the hell out of Pico.
I'm actually looking for a simple editor that works on all platforms, doesn't look totally like ass, and is easy to use. I'll then change things up so people just install that. Basically a GUI cross platform pico would be perfect.