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What did you use to teach yourself Python?

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Re: What did you use to teach yourself Python?

#4
I would learn Python the same way as I learned any language. I had an idea which I HAD to build and I did it. Learning the language was almost secondary. Who learns a language from reading a book. I get about halfway through the table of contents and toss it. I use books as reference.

Re: What did you use to teach yourself Python?

#5
I used the python tutorial and library reference in addition to "Python in a Nutshell" ( http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596001889/ )

With a healthy amount of coding, I've gotten very comfortable with python, although I still feel like I'm not quite utilizing it idiomatically. As such, I've been going through Programming Python ( http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009250/ ) - which is very well written, IMO - as well as reading a healthy amount of other people's source code, notably CherryPy ( http://cherrypy.org/ ), since I use it a lot.

If you're experienced with other languages, I'd suggest implementing something like a tetris clone as an exercise in learning the language. If you're only experienced with web-dev (as is often the case these days), I'd recommend implementing a few small web-apps with CherryPy - it's the most "pythonic" "web framework" I've seen so far.

Oh, and keeping an eye on the mailing lists ( http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo ), particularly python-list, python-ideas, python-dev, and python-3000, can be very enlightening.

Re: What did you use to teach yourself Python?

#9
thinkpython.com - although its supposed to be an introduction to programing using python but it suited me really well, even though I was a C++ programmer for four years. You can skip the basic parts and run through some of the explanations which are for a new programmer but all in all a rapid start guide for python.
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