At the PDX Code Guild, which has a Monday night Flying Circus event, which I've been frequenting -- though not in the last five weeks as my teaching gig was Mon / Weds -- I hear quite a few geeks say they've been studying Learning Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw.
I finally took a look at the on-line version yesterday and notice he's very adamant about learning 2.7, not 3.x. Disappointing. Maybe he's working on the 3.x version. Zed does give a lot of fabulous advice about techniques for learning, emphasizing the importance of the hands-on practicum. Just watching videos gives only casual knowledge. To get it in your bones, you need to write code, learn by doing. He also talks about the importance of sleep and even dreams when it comes to gaining new skills. "Day dream and doodle in code" is advice I give my own students. I also encourage writing deliberately "demented" code when learning, to focus on corner cases. Update about me: In addition to teaching Python to adults (night school gig), I'm an instructor- -in-training with Coding With Kids (CwK), which provides right-after-school coding classes, with one Chromebook per child (work is saved in the cloud). Working with kids means diving into Scratch again, as our Python students tend to come with a Scratch background (what CwK uses with the younger kids, not that adults can't have fun with Scratch; it's quite engaging as many on edu-sig already well know. A path I'd recommend (one of many): Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python 3 http://www.diveintopython3.net/ Allen Downey's Think Python (2nd edition) http://greenteapress.com/wp/think-python-2e/ John Zelle's excellent book is out in a 3rd edition: http://mcsp.wartburg.edu/zelle/python/ for beginner to intermediate, followed by Luciano Ramahlo's Fluent Python for more advanced concepts (e.g. coroutines and asyncio). I introduce Jupyter Notebooks pretty early when working with adults. Then it's time to branch out into more specialized interests i.e. knowledge domains e.g. mathematics with Amit Saha or Peter Farell, or Litvins (I've got math stuff online, some of it even more specialized to spatial geometry meaning lots of Visual Python). Or physics, or bioinformatics, or stats or web apps or... Pymunk sure looks fun. Geeks coming through Flying Circus on Mondays are into all kinds of weird things; I've missed being at the meetups. I'm going to a Hanukkah Party this Monday now that my night gig is over until January, then lets hope I get to Flying Circus again the day after Christmas. Happy New Year everyone. Kirby Urner 4Dsolutions.net /ocn/cp4e.html
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig