[bikingbismuth]

Think Python 2e changed the trajectory of my life. I took a single Java class and hated it so much I gave up on programming. A few years later as a network engineer I had a problem that seemed like it could be scripted and ended up picking up Think Python and fell in love with the language and programming in general.

[bemusedthrow75]

This is just the sort of thing I needed to read.

I am considering changing the trajectory of my own life, towards a more community/maker/teacher role, and I have a freelance/small business idea about teaching but I need sort of "soft syllabus" materials.

I am learning Python myself, having just never had a need for it in all of my professional web development life (I've written apps in just about every other web-focussed programming language, including Perl and Ruby).

It looks like the right language to teach general concepts in, and having a book I can draw from will help.

[eru]

Think Python is also just a really great book, even for people who don't want to stick with Python long term.

[macintux]

Python is challenging as a production language, given its tooling inconsistencies, but it’s a great pseudocode language.

[dleink]

I would like to hear more about your trajectory. I'm in a similar place.

[bemusedthrow75]

It's a sketch of a thought at the moment.

But I am, well, mid-life at best, and the only crisis I am experiencing is that I think much of what I have done for years is worth less than I would have hoped.

I think it is ironic that technology seems to serve people less and less (and advertisers more and more) at just exactly the same time as every possible piece of technology is falling in price and increasing in availability.

Want to make a small device with a colour LCD display, buttons, an entirely custom enclosure, a rechargeable battery and a custom PCB? The cost of doing that has never been lower. Even if you only want one.

Want to give some tool a comfortable handgrip for accessibility reasons that needs to be parametrically adjustable? The software tools are free and the prototyping tools are incredibly cheap.

Want to find the answer to a question about your local area that would have required months of library time? The software is free and shockingly complete data sets are available from governments.

So why do so many people, even adults my age and younger, feel that technology is out of their control?

I have always felt as a freelance developer that the work I am paid for is just the seed in the middle of a larger fruit, where I listen and discuss and explain and educate.

I feel I should be turning it inside out. Making the listening, discussion, education the product, and the development work ancilliary to it (because it almost always is).

What I find interesting about Python, specifically, is how many applications it is suitable for, considering its ease of access -- CAD packages, 3D printing, PCB design, GIS, microcontrollers, statistics. Children's and adult education etc.

So while I have a little time I am spending it re-orienting myself into Python as a programmer "way-of-life", and away from the tools I have been using so far (which has never, really, meant Python).

And as I do so I am getting a sense of how it might fit into me turning my freelance work inside out to become a teacher/trainer/educator/facilitator, largely for adults, to help them have better concepts of technology (even for just the humdrum business of getting suppliers to quote for bespoke projects).

A vague sketch, sorry -- but I think this might answer your question.

[noisy_boy]

Just as an counterexample, I started with bash/Perl, moved to Python and really liked it and then started getting issues due to dynamic typing. Around that time, Java was chosen to be the main language for our team and once I saw the benefits of static typing, there was no looking back. Since then Python has come a long way with optional typing support and IDEs to help enforce it but by now I am forever biased in favor of statically typed languages. I still enjoy Python for writing utility scripts because it is so much more polished compared to just using bash (which has its own place obviously) - but if I have the option of choosing a language for a full fledged application, I would prefer Java/Scala etc (Rust is great but the learning curve is way too steep for most mortals).

I do admit that I haven't had the first-hand experience of optional typing in Python supported by something like PyCharm so it is possible that the tooling has brought the experience to be comparable to working with a statically typed language. If someone has used IntelliJ community edition with Python typing-enforcement turned-on, please share your experience.

[maxbond]

It's a lot easier to appreciate Java when it isn't your first language. I think it's really important for new programmers to have a streamlined experience to their first magical moment with programming, when they understand they can do cool stuff and succeed by being persistent. ("Streamlined" may be overstating it, there will be lots of friction along the way, but it should be caused by bugs they introduced themselves and overcome by debugging, not by tangential or environmental factors.)

There's a lot of context and drudgery involved in programming that can dissuade people before they get to that magical moment, and they can blame themselves and think they weren't smart enough because they don't understand that the deck was stacked against them. For instance with Python, broken virtual environments can be really dissuading for new programmers.

I think Java's opinionated and verbose nature can be cumbersome to beginners, who have never debugged a type confusion issue and so don't give a hoot about static typing. But I think after programming in Python for a while, they'll see why eg declaring what exceptions you'll raise is tremendously helpful.

[ambrose2]

Similar for me - I had learned some Java, Matlab, C, Perl here and there but it wasn’t until Think Python 2e that I was gripped and from there read many other books and changed my career to software.

[el_oni]

What other books did you read that you would recommend?

[ambrose2]

I enjoyed “Data Structures and Algorithms in Python”!

[rmbyrro]

Couldn't this result be more attributable to Python itself than the book?

[ambrose2]

Maybe, but I think the book really was different from any book I had read before. Most books teach the language, but Think Python showed me some of the why, what each data structure might be used for, it would quickly dip into some interesting implementation details to give me a more solid foundation and then zoom out and give me perspective on why something is useful and related software writing skills and tips. It was thorough, but also concise, and the exercises were engaging, so I found myself for the first time really getting sucked into the zone with the problems and time was flying by. This hadn’t happened to me with Java or Perl.

[eru]

In the abstract, yes. But I also know that Think Python is a great book.

(I came across Think Python when I was trying to help other people learn how to program. So I did not learn programming from Think Python, and Python is also not my favourite language. (It's also not my least favourite language, either. Far from it.))

[sn9]

Think Python and the other books in the Think X series are more about how to think like a programmer in X.

It's not just a book about a language, but an introduction into the basics of solving problems as a programmer.

[ambrose2]

Exactly!

[ndjdbdjdbev]

Same here. I moved cities and was looking for a job... I printed a copy of this book and started going through the chapters... This book made me into a software engineer :)

[cjohnson318]

Think Python helped me finally understand OOP for the first time, after a C++ class, a Java class, etc.

[725686]

That must have been Calendar.class