ShowMeDo Blog

Welcome to my new 8-part series guiding you through starting with Python. In this series I will cover:

• Getting a Feel for Python (this post)
• Python Development Environments (IDEs)
• Python ‘under the hood’
• GUI Development
• Web development
• Writing solid code with Unit Tests
• Games and Physics
• Python Advocacy

Side note - are you learning Python? We’ve started Club ShowMeDo which is aimed at new and intermediate Python programmers, our specially-crafted screencast tutorials are aimed directly at getting you to learn Python the easy way.

When you start with Python you’ll first need to decide on a distribution and then test that it has installed successfully. Watch the first two episodes in my Python Newbies series to get started. Generally I recommend that you start with the distribution at python.org and customise it afterwards.

To get a feel for just how much support is available in the Python world, see my two-part Introduction to Python Resources on the Web - the videos show you the important Python sites, news aggregators, documentation and tutorials, download sites and (importantly!) how to get into the community.

If you are new to programming then you might want to try André Roberge’s RUR-PLE learning robot. This packages gives you an easy and contained environment to get started with Python programming. We have three videos, the first two are by RUR-PLE’s author and the third is by one of Horst Jen’s students (Chen) at a computer school for Austrian kids.

If you like podcasts then you’ll love Ron Stephens Python411 mp3s. His most recent (11th March 2007) is about Python Advocacy, a recording of Jeff Rush at PyCon and it is well worth a listen. Ron also hosts a growing list of Python tutorials which are very useful especially if you’re serious about learning Python.

You’ll also want to check Nadav Samet’s Python Challenge - a set of web-based puzzles which can be solved by clever thinking and some Python coding. The challenges grow increasingly tricky, the first few are quite simple - the first should just take a few minutes to solve

If you speak German then you’re in for a treat - watch our excellent 9-part (and growing) series by Lucas Holland and Marius Meinert: Einführung in die Programmierung mit Python.

Finally - if you want to know why Kyran and I are growing ShowMeDo then you can watch our presentation to PyCon 2007 recorded just a month ago.

For written resources I strongly recommend the printed Beginning Python (Hetland) and on-line both the free Dive into Python and Swaroop’s Byte of Python.

If you have questions or you need guidance then leave me a comment or drop me a question in our forum.

Join me for the second entry in a few days when I discuss Python IDEs.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Python ShowMeDos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.