Python 1.1 - Start
What happens when you start looking where to begin learning....
When you want to learn something new and you start researching ways of doing it, you might feel a bit overwhelmed with your options. You have books, youtube, W3 (and many other great tutorial websites), Udemy, edX, Coursera... It took me a while to stand in the middle of them all and to pick and commit to one. They all have their pros and cons, you'll find a number of "experts" praising and complaining about all of them, but what I realised is that the biggest con of my situation is that I am standing still in one place, unable to pick and commit to one course! So my advice to you, newbie to newbie, if you want to follow my trail - just pick Codecademy! There's either no wrong way of learning, because as long as you learn something new - that's a progress! Or every way is wrong, because it doesn't follow some other fancy way and blah blah blah, you're doing it wrong. I think it's better to follow the first principal!
Why Codecademy?
So Codecademy, what's so great about it? It's super simple, well organised, streamlined and initially totally frees you from thinking, so you can focus on storing the fundamental principals of programming in your brain. It's a nice and easy way to baby-step your way into the world of coding. It then proceeds to more complex exercises and introduces you to the problem solving side of programming. What's not so great about it? Tiny things, like the fact that for Python course it uses Python version 2 instead of 3, but the differences are so insignificant that I when I moved on to more advanced courses I picked them all up in an hour or so. You also want to store your first codes, notes and little projects somewhere more accessible than Codecademy, so I recommend to you to copy every exercise from there to somewhere more handy like Google Docs or your IDE (about that later on!). But again, instead of fixating on little imperfections, I recommend to you to just start with Codecademy and take it from there :)
Why Python?
Python is a creation of then Google worker Guido van Rossum, whose main goal was to create a language that is clear, easy to write and to read and avoids low level coding (like memory allocation) without losing its potential. As a result there is a language that is easy to learn and use, but it's still very powerful and as for now, very widely implemented. By starting with Python, you don't only make your first little steps, but automatically start to generate a valuable portfolio that then you can present to your future recruiter. And as you proceed with more advanced courses, you start to create some more and more advanced projects, which will definitely impress whoever looks at them!
Ok, so let's get started.
Click the link to visit Codecademy website and sign up for a free account. You can also pay for a Pro account something about $20 a month to:
- Access more content and exercises;
- Be able to use their mobile app, that allows you to refresh your memory and practice in a bus or while having a walk;
- Motivates you a bit (I mean you pay for something, you want you value back!).
I didn't pay though. Going through their free Python course gave me enough knowledge and encouragement to continue with more advanced courses. Look at the picture below - this is how Codecademy home page looks like after logging in.
If you're like me, you might feel that navigation on the site is a bit clumsy at the beginning. They'll definitely try to get you to sign up for pro or even more - pay for an intensive course, which I don't know enough about to comment on. What I did was I went to Catalog tab marked in red on the picture above and scrolled down to Courses section and selected Learn Python.
And this is how you start! I probably won't be writing more than one more post about Codecadamy as it's pretty straight forward to use. Thanks for reading and good luck!
J.
How many "Dublin dollars" did you pay again?😋
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