I recently enrolled in a Python Online Course – although I’ve been using it for more than a year now, It was always good to go back to the roots of it and refresh the fundamental knowledge I have.
The online course I’m talking about is this: learnpythonthehardway.org.
It’s a very straight forward beginners guide to creating scripts using the platform. The author was great in explaining every detail and every output. He encourages learners to not copy and paste, but to actually code what he wrote on the site.
So whats in it for me?
We’ll I’ve always been fascinated with automation using scripting languages. I find it “attractive” and “fulfilling” creating different scripts to automate a complex process – and Python is, if not the best, is one of the best there is. It’s so simple and yet so powerful. Extremely easy to learn – allowing developers to be creative with it! Some might not say the same thing, but I’m very excited just thinking about the things I can do with it.
I used it so far:
- Automated our side by side comparison generation.
- Automate my local application deployment.
- Web scrapping and putting them on a database (cannot give details on this one though).
- Simple Registration process using DJango
If you’re going to start it though, make sure you either have Notepad++ (if you’re on windows) or TextWrangler/Sublime Text (in Mac). Open up your terminals (Mac comes with python 2 – as of this writing). Something like this:
Some Tips:
- Start with a TextEditor – not a IDE that has intellisense in it. There is no fun with that. If you need documentation, use the pydocs!
- Pydocs <object> – Extremely Helpful!
- Python Editor Plugin for Sublime Text.
- Get Projects! Don’t just practice – do real stuff and contribute!
Join me in improving this comparison tool! https://github.com/alvinjayreyes/svnDiffToHtml
Happy Coding!