TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

An attempt at a practical exploration of Python for newcomers

In open office format here. (I know, I know, LaTeX heresy!) This post may be more up to date if I corrected anything though.

This document isn't explicitly about the syntax and 'overview of language features' of Python. Figure out the syntax of Python yourself from examples, Google, guessing, or error messages. Some features will be mentioned in passing when they're not obviously inferred from the example.
If you're looking for a style guide (sometimes the best way to learn syntax): check out “PEP 8”: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ (I disagree with some of it, of course, but PEP 8 explicitly is fine with that.)

Pro tip 1: never use tabs.
Pro tip 2: read what an error message actually says before asking for help. They're very unlike C++ compilers' vague template-related errors over which people tend to get glazed eyes.
Pro tip 3:
“Very often it will be faster for you to try something out on the computer than to look it up in the manual. Besides, the computer is always right, and the manual could be wrong.”
--Apple II Basic Programming Manual

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