I was wrong about learning Python through projects first

For months I tried reading tutorials and watching videos about Python, but nothing stuck. Then a guy in a coding meetup in Austin told me to just start with a simple project like a calculator or a to-do list. After building my first calculator function for about 3 hours, I finally understood how loops and variables work together. Has anyone else found that jumping into a tiny project helped more than all the theory lessons?

3 comments

3 Comments

casey1623d ago

3 hours on a calculator function right. My first real project was a dice roller for D&D. Took me 4 hours to get random.randint to work right with a loop. But when that die finally rolled a 20 on screen I understood how functions talk to each other. The syntax errors taught me more than any tutorial could. That feeling when you fix a bug without googling it. Thats when it clicks.

adam_lewis23d ago

Man, I gotta push back on that a little. I mean, not everyone's brain works like that where you just throw yourself into a bug pit and come out knowing everything. I spent way too many hours on stuff like that and ended up learning bad habits instead of good ones. Syntax errors can teach you what NOT to do but they don't teach you why something works. Like I still see people write spaghetti code because they just moved stuff around until it didn't error out. Tutorials and proper docs might feel boring but at least they show you the right way the first time. Maybe it's just me but I'd rather spend 30 minutes reading than 3 hours guessing.

simon_coleman22d ago

Putting in the time to trace every step in a debugger is what finally made it click for me.