Please be aware, Augusto, that Rick is known to be a bit... OTT. Don't take him too seriously (but he's not an idiot either).
On 19 June 2013 14:58, <augusto...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello! > This is my first post in this group and the reason why I came across here is > that, despite my complete lack of knowledge in the programming area, I > received an order from my teacher to develop a visually interactive program, > until 20th July, so we can participate in a kind of contest. > > My goal is to learn and program it by myself, as good as the time allows me. > That said, what I seek here is advice from people who definitively have more > experience than me on topics like: is it possible to develop this kind of > program in such a short amount of time? Possible? Yes. It'll be well'ard to get much done with too limited a knowledge base, but it should be possible even then. > What kinds of aspects of Python should I focus on learning? What tutorials > and websites are out there that can help me? What kind of already done > packages are out there that I can freely use, so I do not need to create all > the aspects of the program froms scratch? Neil Cerutti suggested Tkinter. Choosing a good simple GUI toolkit is a good idea over Pygame for something like this. I've used Pygame and I guarantee you it's not the hammer you want. (I don't know much about GUI's to be honest, though.) > It would be wise to give an abstract of the program. I made an information > flux kind of graphic, but I do not know how to post it in here, so I'll use > only words: <STUFF> > Thats basically the whole program. I've been studying Python for a week and > half now, through: How to think like a Computer Scientist and Invent with > Python and Pygame. I'm still at the very beggining, though, and I can't make > much more than make some images appear on a Pygame screen in a menu-like > style, with a patterned gap between them. No mouse interactions up to now. In regards to this, I really would recommend just taking Rick's suggestion: Tkinter; canvas; menu; etc. Now, as I'm probably the most new programmer here I'll point out that I don't agree with Chris when he says that: > One way or > another, you will probably spend the next week writing code you throw > away; if you try to tackle the primary project immediately, you'll > have to rewrite parts of it as you learn. It's easier to throw away a > toy "Hello world" program than hunks of what you thought would be your > final code. As a new programmer, you will throw away code whether or not you practice beforehand. Beware of that. If anything, it's the best thing you can do*. Other than that, he's spot on. Personally, I'd start on the big project sooner rather than later, but not be afraid to dump all the code every now and again. *Anecdote time; a friend of mine who learned VB as his first language wrote as one of his earlier scripts a 2075 line program with no indentation - I still have a copy of that gem tucked away in a very dark corner. Last point; DRY. Look it up and breathe it. People might wonder why I'm making that big a deal about it (it's not the be-all and end-all of anything) but as a new programmer most of your random bits of not-nice-looking code will probably just be a breach of DRY. If you've written the same thing 5 times you've *probably* done it in a not-too efficient manner and the real solution will be the next ladder up in the hierarchy of programming. As someone new, paying a fair bit of attention to this will probably make what you learn some important higher-level concepts faster. Best of luck, I hope I added something helpful. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
