Re: want to learn coading.
Before I give this answer, @26, I thought you were trying to learn C after having programmed in something else. I think it's really important to emphasize that my answers here are aimed at someone who hasn't ever touched coding beyond perhaps a few lines at some point or something. If someone who could already program some asked me the same questions they'd get a different answer.
With that in mind, first, I'm afraid I don't have a better Python book. I first programmed 15 years or so ago, on dial-up internet and back in the days when you could only run Jaws on a mainframe (I will never forget going to Best Buy, asking what the best computer they had was, then watching my parents debate whether it met the minimum specs or not). So in terms of me being able to easily lay my hands on resources and throw out links, I can't, though given how often this comes up it might be worth me doing some sort of evaluation so that I can next time. But if you just google online Python book you will find lots and lots of them.
Second, stick to one language. Don't stick to one learning resource. After language 3 or so learning new languages is really easy. Until then, you'll get caught up in the details if you try it, and spend more time than you should getting confused because the basics will be just different enough. In practice, the first programming language you learn will teach you to program in Python, say. You'll think about all of software in Python, you'll write down your ideas in Python, you'll explain things to other people in Python, etc. When you learn a second language, you have to learn how to think about programming without thinking about programming in a specific programming language, and that's really, really hard. Potentially harder than learning to program in the first place. But then language 3 is a lot easier, and by language 4 or 5 you can pick up new ones in a Saturday. I used to argue against BGT, and this is one of the reasons why--whatever you learn first, you're stuck with it for a long time until you develop programming-without-a-language thinking.
But this doesn't hold true for learning resources. People are really, really bad at thinking about programming. It goes against what humans are hard-wired for. I can say with complete seriousness that if you become a very, very good programmer, it changes who you are, just by making you develop all these thought skills that people in general don't have. I don't know how long it takes to get to that point, but programming is about learning to take the world apart and put it back together in a fundamentally different way that only programmers think about on a regular basis, where you can literally tell some processed sand and lightning in a box how to do stuff for you. That sounds poetic. But the gap is really that big.
And so your best bet for learning resources is to find a book, or a really, really good set of tutorials, that speaks to you. Feel free to jump around all you want, if whatever you're using isn't clicking. There's tons and tons of them out there, and they all use different analogies, different ways of taking apart the problem, different ways of turning programmer into something someone trying to do it for the first time can understand. But thee really, really important point is that whatever you find needs to be about both Python and about programming. It is very easy to find tutorials that explain how loops work in Python which will let you write a program that prints numbers, but that sort of author isn't writing for people who haven't programmed at all, they're writing for people who haven't programmed in Python at all. That's a big difference. Whatever you use, it needs to be teaching you how to think about things you want to do and how to translate them to software, not just how the language works. You either have to get that kind of thing from someone else, which takes weeks, or you figure it out on your own, which takes years of constant practice. Again, not exaggerating. The difference between picking this up from someone or something that's teaching you how to put things together versus going to something like W3Schools that shows you all the jigsaw puzzle pieces without showing you the puzzle is actually, literally that much of a difference.
So, good luck. I did it. You can too. But it takes a while. You have to care about it for its own sake if you want to get really good with it, and you have to put significant time in.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
