> I apologize to the list again for the noisy contentless ranting I made > yesterday, so I'll try making it up by doing concrete demos of a > function-focused approach. This will critique Zelle's Chapter Two and > Chapter Five, and see what things would look like if under a function > regime. > < snip>
I am an elderly person somewhat physically handicapped with some experience programming in basic and pascal, many years ago. In order to keep myself mentally active I decided to have a look once again at programming and chose python as a good language to start with. So, I had a look at 'Dive into Python', bought a couple of books, 'Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner' and 'Learn to program Using Python'. All was well to start with until I came to the section on functions. I am finding it very difficult to grasp the reasoning behind the use of functions and how and when to use them. I keep trying to see if any of the snippets of programs that I have already come across are transferable into functions without a great deal of success. The problem appears to be that, and here I agree with the writer, functions are introduced as something on their own, well after manipulating strings, lists, dictionaries, tuples, loops etc are dealt with. Having studied the examples given here, I am beginning to get some understanding of what is going on. If only I could find many more examples like these, in simple English, I would be a very happy student. > Anyway, hope this helps! It certainly helps me. Norman _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
