On Nov 7, 2008, at 12:14 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi everyone,
I've been teaching myself python for a few months and I'm becoming
frustrated because I've kind of hit a wall in terms of learning new
information. In an effort to continue to learn I've found some
material on more intermediate/advanced topics like linked lists,
nodes, trees, etc. However, it's kind of like reading a math
textbook - the tutorials do a decent job of explaining the material
but it's all kind of theoretical, and I'm not sure how I'd apply
these concepts in real world applications, or incorporate them into
my code. Does anyone have any suggestions for learning about real
world application of more advanced concepts?
Are you writing real-world applications and using them? My (admittedly
limited) experience has taught me that the real complexities of
programming don't lie in obscure data structures or rarely-used
functions, but in the practical, real-world issues that arise from
creating actual applications: OOP best practices, application
architecture, programming paradigms, recurring patterns, even just
plain-old programming gotchas (though there are fewer of these in
Python than other languages, thankfully). In other words, stuff that
isn't necessarily described in the manuals, but that becomes evident
once you've made the same mistakes two or three times, and start
thinking about modifying your approach to programming. I've never used
a tree, and a heap only once, but I feel like I've dipped into some
pretty mind-bending stuff in terms of how I've arranged programs. Take
metaclasses, for instance: no description of metaclasses I've read
ever made sense to me; it only started to come clear after I'd looked
at a module I was writing, realized that there was something really
fundamentally wrong with it, and then slowly realized that the answer
was metaclasses. About eleven lines of metaclass programming, as it
turned out, but those seven lines turned my brain inside out for a
bit. Not boring in the least!
Yrs,
Eric
Also, are there other concepts that I should focus on? Frankly, I'm
a bit bored because I've hit this ceiling, and I'm not really sure
where to go to next.
Thanks,
Ben
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_______________________________________________
Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
