PARALYSIS BY ANALYSIS

I was recently asked on Quora this question: What’s the worst way to learn programming?

Even though I am not a programmer but rather someone who is learning Python for fun, I did dare to answer the question. My response was:

Starting to many online courses at once and spending to much time on planning what and from where to learn.

I responded because I went through the same experience. You can get trapped into the false perception of doing progress, while everything that you are actually doing is planning and checking next cool learning site for coding. Codecakes, Udacity, Udemy, Teaching Tree, Learn Python the Hard Way, Codecademy, Code School… To name just a few. Stop planning to much, to precisely. You can easily spend too much time on checking these resources but I do believe this is waste of time.

By my opinion, what you should do is to determine the maximum amount of time that you are willing to spend on planning. Once you ran out of the time you must start learning and following one or two resources until you complete the lessons. Than you should move on, otherwise the learning process is confusing and unefficient.

How much time did you take for making your learning plan ?

 

DAY_3_learn_from_different_sources

This is my third day into the Python learning. With all the enthusiasm that newbies are known for I printed myself the non programmer’s tutorial for python 3 book, started codecademy and purchased two courses on Udemy. That was the first day. So far I have almost passed codecademy (2 courses left), went through Udemy’s Introduction to computer Science and Python, I read 10 chapters of the book and listened to the 65 video tutorials from the second Udemy course The Ultimate Python Programming Tutorial. 

My first programme ever (easy to guess) was of course famous:

print(“Hello world”)

However, I learned quickly how steep learning curve will be. For instance: AND and OR are logical operators. You will soon learn when pair of each return True or False. But why is NOT good for ? Why would I write True in the following way: NOT False. And why would I write False like this: NOT True.  At the moment I do not get it but I believe smart people who created these rules had a good reason for that. Hopefully, I will find out why this concept is important later on.

Another revelation from today’s learning: Sometimes, it is useful to learn same topic from different sources. For instance, I read about while loops on the very first day of my learning. This topic was later covered in the video course as well. Obvious advantage of going through the same staff more than once is better retention of the information. Less obvious is the fact, that different instructors and different books will provide you with different pearls. This is how I learned about:

\t and \n

If you are interested in what is the magic of \t and \n type it in your text editor and check the outcome.

I will finish by mentioning one more experience. It reminded me how much I will need to learn to become more comfortable in the world of Python and coding en general.

So, initially I installed Python 3 on my computer. Later I installed Python 2 as well. Because Instructor in one of the courses was using Python 2 I also wanted to code in 2. After writing some code in IDLE and pressing F5 to check the outcome, window with this text promped out:

-*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Terrifying experience. What kind of a chiffre is that ?  Fortunately I found stackoverflow.com where they kindly answered my question.

We will hear soon. I am looking forward to share freshly learned concepts and my experience of learning with you.