Hey folks. I'm just starting to pick up Python, and I'd like to avoid some of the mistakes I made in the past. To elaborate on that, my primary programming/scripting experience is PHP, with a little bit of Perl thrown in. Like so many people who write in PHP, I was entirely self-taught, and would be the first to admit that a lot of what I've written is, well... wrong. It works, but it's sloppy and inefficient, because there were standard constructions and solutions I just didn't know about. I'd like to avoid that with Python.
So: my first two questions to the list. 1) Python 2.7 or 3.x? I know I'm going to want to do some work with NLTK (which appears to only have an alpha version out for Python 3), but I've just gone through the hassle of dealing with an upgrade from PHP 4 to 5.3, and I'd rather not start learning something that's already obsolete. Any words of advice? 2) Best practices. I have the WROX Press Beginning Python book, which targets Python 2. Clearly that's of only limited value if I'm going to go with Python 3, but it looks like it's at least going to be a good overview. But some of the stuff they do seems to be fairly personalized, rather than trying to follow standards. Should I just start out with the tutorial from docs.python.org? I would assume that that would start putting me in the right habits from the beginning... is that accurate, or is there a better way to go? Thanks in advance, Andy McKenzie
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