I must first clarify that I do have some understanding of programming. Back in the day when I was in college studying electronics we were taught the basics of programming. Unfortunately the language we were being taught was "Turbo Pascal". In its self not a bad language,Why?
So what has brought me back to programming this time? Well my job has heavy involvement in technology use and support. Just like I suspect many of us do, I occasionally come across situations where I feel a software program will be able to increase my productivity or others by automating certain tasks.
But why have I chosen python?
I love technology, but then more and more people do now. It is almost impossible to follow all the different trends and stay current with what is happening. So to keep up to date while i am on the road I listen to Podcasts(Netcasts), many of them. The majority of what I listen to comes from the TWiT network. A brillant network run by a gentleman in the truest sense of the word, Leo Laporte. The show(or series of shows) that inspired me to pick up and play with Python is the FLOSS Weekly show. This is a series of shows hosted by Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz about Free/Libre Open Source Software they have discussions about open source projects and software along with interviews with people from the open source community. I have picked up from these shows information about python and how good it is as a language.
So Python is open source. A brilliant reason by its self and it also is an extremely versatile and plays well with other programming types. See here.
So how am I learning?
Now this is the stage that I normally fall down on. I normally search and search and search until I find a few suitable web sites with tutorials and I jump between them until the one that matches my level of knowledge becomes aparent. This time is different, I have stumbled across a fantastic tutorial site that not only covers Python but at the same time covers VBScript and JavaScript.
This may at first seem confusing but as it is clearly explained it is an excellent way to show how different languages are often share similar frameworks, along with the chance to learn how to read a program.
The "course" is well structured(at least so far), with descriptions of each chapter along with plenty of example codes to try out and experiment with. Starting with the by now familiar "Hello World" style of code up to... well I have not found out yet, but I am starting to play around with dictionaries.
The Site: http://www.alan-g.me.uk
To the writer of this site. Many thanks for sharing your knowledge in such a well written and structured way.
To the developers and community of Python. Brilliant, get this into UK education.
UPDATE - More information after hearing back from the content creator.
First of all thank you for to Alan for getting back to me. He has provided me with some more information will I shall post about in the near future. This update is more about correcting some mistakes.
- Updated the website address to the new one. Which has two versions(more on that one later).
- Secondly it seems I was mistaken about the death of the Turbo pascal programming language. Quoted from an e-mail from the site creator Alan Gauld
"Finally TurboPascal is alive and well
in the form of Delphi by Borland.
(And the Opensource FreePascal which
is compatible with it) I still use it
as my preferred tool for building
Windows programs."
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