On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 10:54 PM, Mike Malveaux <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi folks, the subscription confirmation asked for an intro, so here goes. > > My name is Mike. I live in Tacoma. I'm not really a programmer -- my last > job was Snowboard Instructor, and for years before that I drove and > dispatched trucks -- but circumstances have convinced me that learning to > program is a Good Thing.
The more different backgrounds people in SeaPIG have, the better. > But, which language first? > > The sources I've seen that I like best indicate that BASIC is no longer > considered the best program for newbies (nor for anything else, apparently). > But Python seems to be well recommended for neophytes, and looks like it > will do most or maybe all of the web scripting stuff I want to do down the > road. Python has a strength in web programming, especially more complex and structured applications. It also has niches in scientific computing and audio/video editing, and general sysadmin or glue code. So those are the places where you'll find a lot of Python programmers. There may be others I'm not remembering. > So, here I am! I've begun working my way through the tutorial document at > http://docs.python.org/tutorial and I'm looking forward to see you kind > folks in person, probably next month. Probably 90% of the discussion will > go whizzing over my head, so I promise to listen more than I speak. SeaPIG is for people of all abilities. Feel free to ask questions here or at a meeting. If you'd like to spend some time at a meeting going over several things, just mention it on the list and we'll fit it into the schedule. We sometimes have general Q&A sessions or open-discussion sessions, so maybe there'll be one of those in the next few months. I learned Python from the official tutorial. I don't have much opinion on the other books, except Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into Python" and "Dive into Python 3". I knew Mark when we were both at Linux Gazette, and he's a good writer. The first decision you'll have to make is whether to learn Python 2 or 3. I'd recommend 3 now because it's the way of the future. But many of us are still on 2 because libraries we depend on haven't been ported to 3 yet. That may happen to you if you get into one of the specialist niches, but for general Python programming, 3 is fine. The language is 90% the same between them, just some details have been cleaned up in 3 and some things moved around and some new features, and strings/unicode are handled differently. -- Mike Orr <[email protected]>
