This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Darrell Norton. Original Post: How to Learn Python Feed Title: Darrell Norton's Blog Feed URL: /error.htm?aspxerrorpath=/blogs/darrell.norton/Rss.aspx Feed Description: Agile Software Development: Scrum, XP, et al with .NET Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Darrell Norton Latest Posts From Darrell Norton's Blog

Hopefully I’ve convinced you to learn Python this year. Or maybe Sam Gentile did (Sam’s Python category). Either way you’re wondering how to start learning Python.

Python.org

The Python home page has a lot of information, so much so that it is bewildering to the new Python user. Skip the “What is Python?” page link (I’ll show you a better getting-started site). A better description of Python can be found at the Python programming language definition on Wikipedia. The important parts of Python.org are the Python documentation pages and the Introductory Material on Python page.

Dive Into Python

Mark Pilgrim’s book, web site, and Python resource hub. The book is free and comes in HTML, PDF, Word, plain text, and XML formats. If you are like me, and like to have the dead trees version so you don’t have to alt-tab back and forth, you can pick up a copy from Amazon.

Mark also lists 10 different versions of Python, and the first chapter in the book tells you how to set it up on each of the three major platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix/Linux) and how to ensure that you have it setup correctly. The style so far is great and I highly recommend Dive Into Python.

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

This book was written by a high school professor, a college professor, and a Python programmer for the College Board’s Advanced Placement computer science classes (where high school student can earn college credit if they pass a test) because it offered “higher level of success and a lower level of frustration” than C++. This book is also free online. Mark Pilgrim refers to this book often in Dive Into Python.

Python Cookbook

ActiveState, producers of a win32 port of Python, have a great online Python Cookbook. Every one of the 1000+ recipes on the web site is free, and many of them went into the making of the Python Cookbook 2^nd edition from O’Reilly (here is the first edition). They are sorted by category, editor’s pick, approval status, and date, or you can search all the recipes by keywords.

Daily Python-URL

This weblog-like (RSS feed) contains a daily list of links to things going on in the Python realm. Most of it won’t mean much at first, since it often contains articles and debates about future Python language features, parsers, and libraries you probably don’t care about to start off with.

Python.oreilly.com

In case you could not figure it out, this is on the O’Reilly network. The good stuff are the articles and the Python success stories part 1 and Python success stories part 2.

Where to go from here

Start by downloading the Dive Into Python book. Download the recommended IDE for your platform. If you are on Windows, you will be downloading ActiveState’s port of Python, ActivePython. Make sure to choose version 2.4. It comes with a pretty handy IDE called Pythonwin that has syntax coloring and Intellisense. Note that you do NOT have to give your contact info to ActiveState to download; just click the Next button.

Next time I’ll talk about the different ports of Python that would be of interest to the Windows/.NET programmer.

Update: I found and added a link to the Daily Python URL rss feed.