Materials for an ongoing course with CodeCats at the Zeppelin University.
Expect a lot of Python
[...] become more demanding of Python. Pretend that Python is a magic wand that will miraculously do whatever you want without you needing to lifting a finger. Ask, "how does Python already solve my problem?" and "What Python language feature most resembles my problem?" You will be absolutely astonished at how often it happens that thing you need is already there in some form. In fact, this phenomenon is so common, even among experienced Python programmers, that the Python community has a name for it. We call it "Guido's time machine", because sometimes it seems as though that's the only way he could've known what we needed, before we knew it ourselves.
It is possible to become productive with Python very fast - even as an absolute beginner in programming. This has a lot to do with the design of the language. It is optimized for people instead of machines. It als comes with batteries included, which means, that there are a lot of problems solved for you already and you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you are trying to build something. Due to the maturity and popularity of the language there is also a huge number of useful third party tools and libraries (and many of them are Free Software). This mix makes working with Python easy and fun.
With this collection of materials I try to organize what I learned about Python and its vast ecosystem over the years into something that will hopefully be useful for beginning and intermediate Pythonistas (maybe the old hands even see something, they didn't know yet).
- Official docs portal
- Official Python2 documentation
- Official Python3 documentation
- Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
Slightly / wildly advanced stuff:
Generally there are a lot of good talks and tutorial videos from the many Python related conferences online, so it's always worth a look to see, if there is a talk about a technology or practice you are interested in. Some of the core developers are also giving very good talks.
The talks from the Python creator and BDFL Guido van Rossum are always also worth watching
- Mailing lists overview
- help (for asking questions)
- tutor (also for asking questions!?)
- list (general discussion)
- dev (for core devs)
- IRC
Code is under MIT license and content is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
