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During the past few years, I've made a few feeble attempts at learning Python. It sounds like a powerful, versatile and popular programming language. I've never gotten past the introduction though and during my last attempt none of the example code I found on the net worked properly, they all gave syntax errors which I couldn't debug. Has anyone else by any chance had similar experiences?

why python?

why not C\C++?

No particular reason really. I'd love to learn C and C++ as well, but I need to start somewhere.

My answer is the same for any language. Think of some program/project that you want to use. After you have run thru the basic tutorials, just start coding. When you get to a point when you don't know how to do something, google it and then ask a forum if you still don't have an answer.

Tutorials and sample problems are ok, but unless you are really interested, it is hard to care much about what you are doing.

TheIrishThug: My approach is just as you describe it. My last attempt never made it past the first script. I couldn't get a single script to run without errors. I was just frustrated and thought perhaps I wasn't the only one. I suppose I'll give it another go sometime and if I still can't get even the simplest of scripts/programs to work, I'll find a more suitable forum to vent my frustration. Thanks for listening!

I completely agree that it's difficult to care to learn without a specific goal in mind.

Anyway Murp|e,

You can navigate to this page,
http://gigapedia.info/1/python

where you will find free ebooks on python language

but to download them you will need to register and login at gigapedia.com

you can find hundreds of them, totally free!

Thanks CyberGeek, that looks like a nice resource indeed!

C++ Guru:

I am certain C/C++ has many advantages, but the above sounds like a very good reason to learn Python. I'm about to try a few examples from the book (Like Hello World) and hopefully they will run without problems....

If anyone else ever reads this thread and has similar problems. My problem was due to the fact that all of the examples I happened to have found online and in books were based on version 2 of Python whereas I had downloaded and installed the latest version 3, which is evidently quite different. E.g. print 'hello world' did not work on version 3, after installing version 2.6.5 everything seems to work as expected.

Yeah, Python3 is still pretty fresh and hasn't been fully adopted. The project I'm doing at work is all Python2. I would expect the error message for print would be clear enough that it would be obvious that it is now a function. With that issue solved, hopefully you get farther along the road.

As far as the comment about C++/Java vs Python. I would say that a lot of that comes from the fact that those languages are strongly typed and Python is not. Similar to AHK, a function is only validated to have the correct number of arguments. If you use the function incorrectly, you can't be told that when you try to run it. Where as Java will tell me while I'm coding that I tried to pass object A when the function expects object B. And if that path doesn't always get executed, you might not know about bugs in your code for a while.

A friend of mine who had to learn Python for some research
told me that some tutorials got mistaken implementations.

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"Read the manual. Read it again. Search the forum.
Try something before asking. Show what you've tried."

Antonio França
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TheIrishThug: IRC solved the problem for me, not the error message. I hadn't thought about the fact that Java and the likes are less prone to error due to their strongly typed nature. The quote says python is typically much short than C code. A simply GUI with an ok and cancel button was one third the length in AHK than in Python though, if that means anything.

Hello World! Example Comparison

In Python


In C


In C++

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Check out http://groups.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/index.html

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In Cobol:



(http://groups.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/c ... world.html)

I checked the area of application for Cobol and it says "COBOL is ideally suited for the solution of business problems. For example, if a company wanted to keep track of its employees’ annual wages, COBOL would be ideal language for implementation". That sounds fairly odd to me. It sounds like something a database would be well suited to handle, not a programming language.