

Learning to program (Python) the right way? - jhacks

I'm looking to learn to program, the right way. I don't want to pick up bad habits and I'm hoping there is some good guidance out there that will help.<p>Currently I know the following: HTML, CSS, and some Javascript and jQuery. That's all front end though and I want to start to learn how to get the back end going.<p>While I want to understand the big concepts, I ultimately learn by doing. I get to a problem, and figure out through trial and error, research, or even questions here... and once it's solved, I've learned something. So, if I could learn by building up my startup, that would be great. The only thing with that though, I know that certain (if not many) aspects of my startup are not new and I don't want to approach writing things from scratch when it's already been done well (certainly better than I could currently manage) already and available in some framework (i.e. Django). However, I don't want to rely on frameworks either to solve all my problems... so I would like to find a balance between building efficiently (using/learning a framework) and learning to code from scratch (i.e. Python).<p>Anyway, help here would be greatly appreciated. Also, guidance on other topics in regards to building a website (since I know there is more than just the code) would be great. Thanks!
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fjw
I suggest Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way
(<http://learnpythonthehardway.org/>) which is free online and focuses on
having you type the code and getting it to work. This is what I used to learn
basic Python and it sounds like it fits your learning approach as well.

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macco
For an great introduction to programming in general try to learn
<http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/> or <http://www.htdp.org/> Both are great
books, but they require a lot of resilience if you want to get the most out of
them.

One of the best introductions to Python is <http://www.diveintopython.net/>
but it's not in introduction to programming in general.

If you want both try: Core Python Programming <http://corepython.com/> \- but
it's not free.

For learning a Python framework I would recommend the web2py book:
<http://web2py.com/book> web2py makes you very productive, imo.

You can find a great list of free programming books here:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-
ava...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available-
programming-books)

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jerfelix
Consider looking at well-written Python code. Try to understand exactly how it
works.

Example, django source:
<http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/django/>

~~~
zmitri
Reading well written code is an excellent way to do so. The source code for
Tornado is also quite clear <https://github.com/facebook/tornado>

Look into _args and_ *kwargs and first class functions in python.

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karlzt
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2701504>

<http://learncodethehardway.org/>

