On Saturday 17 Jan 2009 5:04:07 pm Chetan Nichkawde wrote: > The only way to learn programming is to program.
I have been writing code since 1986, but never considered myself a programmer. My code does what is needed and doesn't crash, but most of it is cut and paste and repair without really knowing what I was doing. This year I decided to do something about it. I remember reading somewhere about setting oneself small problems and incrementally increasing the complexity. Rather like going to the driving range of a golf course now and then to shore up the fundamentals. At the same time I am too busy (and not the type) to take a book and work at it from beginning to end. At the same time I have to keep to deadlines and produce working applications - so what I do now is: Every day open the Python cookbook at random and work on whatever recipe it opens at. Try to customise it. Often it is stuff that I know (or think I know). I do it anyway - one recipe. Thorough. The first one happened to be writing a class to convert temperatures from any scale to any other - that took me three days exploring all the highways and byways it opened up. Coding against deadlines does not really help one improve one's skills - the deadline is there, so one repeats what one already knows and resorts to ugly hacks and compromises. Also workarounds since there is no time to learn something new. -- regards Kenneth Gonsalves Associate NRC-FOSS http://nrcfosshelpline.in/web/ _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
