Jan 07
Learning Python
A few years back, I toyed with learning Python. At the time, though, I had more pressing demands on my time and, reluctantly, gave up pretty soon in the process.
I’m not a natural developer. My mind seems to work more like the broad sweeps of an oil painting, rather than the fine watercolour detail necessary for thinking through algorithms. However, I’m pretty sure that with some work and practice I can retrain myself to think in the right way.
In the past, I’ve toyed with Basics (Spectrum, Jetsam and AMOS, mostly), learnt the bare bones of C, was mildly productive with PHP and, more recently, have been impressed by some aspects of Ruby. However, any coding I’ve done has always been lazy and, largely, cobbled together from examples.
So, armed with a link to Dive into Python and offers of support from my colleagues, I’m hoping to do it properly this time. Wish me luck 
January 7th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Welcome to the Pythonista crowd!
Dive into Python is well-known, but I would definitely advise you to have a _concrete_ and _solid_ project to hack on, and try to solve it using Python.
I did try a couple of times to learn python just by following tutorials and such, and failed, just because I didn’t have anything to build with this programming language.
I guess it must be the same for any other programming language, though.
Go Python Matt, Go!
January 8th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Agreed with No` - having a project to work on certainly helps. Python is great, though - makes you feel really productive, really quickly. Hope you enjoy.