On 19/10/2014 20:57, Ryan Shuell wrote:
Thanks guys. I just feel frustrated that I can't do something useful. I'm reading all about dictionaries, and types, and touples. Then I read about string manipulation and loops; two of my favorite things to do. Then I read about logic: -719 >= 833 False That's great, but it's just not very useful for me. I thought I could use Python to do screen scraping. Right now, I use R to do almost all my screen scraping. I used to use Excel, but r is just light years easier to use, so I'll go with that. I thought Python may be even easier to use than R, and perhaps even more powerful too. However, since I picked up my first Python book about 3 months ago, I seem to be learning all kinds of useless things, and no practical things. When I find cool code samples online, I can't even get them to run. Last week I found a small sample of code that supposedly merges data from several text files in a folder into one single file. I played with it for a couple hours, and never got it to work. In less than 15 minutes, I could have done the merging task, using Excel, Access, VB.NET <http://VB.NET>, C#.NET, or even a batch file. I guess I'll just keep reading these books. I have 10 books, and I'm most of the way throguh 4 of them. So far, none are teaching me anything that I could use in my role managing financial assets. Maybe something will click soon. I hope so. Thanks again everyone.
For screen scraping you need Beautiful Soup, but if you can't run anything yet and can't install anything yet what is the point? You can read as many books as you like, but until you understand the basics of Python and not other languages that you've previously used, you'll get precisely nowhere.
-- My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask what you can do for our language. Mark Lawrence -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
