Last week actually (2.7 btw). As not performant as it used to be. Meant to talk about parallelism.
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Last week actually (2.7 btw). As not performant as it used to be. Meant to talk about parallelism.
Bluedanger
Junior Member
- Jun 18, 2016
- 131
- 51
Creating hacking tools has never been easier! Pygame is rad cuz you can build regular programs and make android apps with python
mister_digital
Junior Member
- Jun 22, 2016
- 102
- 6
Try thinkful.com if you got a small budget to learn.
judaculla
Regular Member
- Oct 11, 2014
- 338
- 134
My advice would be to first come up with task-specific goal that you'll be working to complete with pyhton. Such as—build a simple app with Django (wouldn't recommend for first timers), build a web scraper, build an automatic email responder, an SMS alerter, a text-analyzer, etc... whatever you are interested in. stackexchange.com is a great place to learn, and chances are if you google how to do * in python, you'll either find a link to the official python documentation or stackexchange.
True, but it's reeeeaaaaallllly overwhelming to those without a point of reference.
Agreed, completely. Use for reference only starting out, unless you've just got time to burn.
I'm relatively new to Python still, as I am to programming in general. I can say, still with a decently accessible memory of the roadblocks of starting out, that there are some key pieces of advice I wish someone had sat me down and reeealy made me be cognizant of. Here are a few of those:
1. Learn to do things the way others are doing them, then adapt your own approach.
If you try to learn, while thinking "ok, but it would be so much better to do it this way " you'll get to a point where you don't understand what's going on, and won't be able to walk things back bc you did things your way before understanding the established way. (btw, this is the advice I most often don't listen to myself)
2. Find a Good Package of Python
Basically, a package is Python, with a lot of external libraries included. A quality deployment has a lot of other useful features too, but I won't go into them all. My recommendation would be Anaconda3, which is completely free, and can be downloaded here: https://www.continuum.io/downloads This is free, and includes Python 3 and many external libraries. Everything Python you need to get started.
3. Find A Good IDE
IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, and is the program that you will actually be programming in. Visual Studio from Microsoft is an widely-adopted IDE for most languages, but I found getting started with it to be quite troublesome while working with Python. It has a lot of features that aren't remotely related to Python, and is quite bloated in many regards compared to more specialized IDEs. The IDE I found to work the best for me is PyCharm, which has a free community version available for download here: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/ (scroll down a bit) There is a paid version available, but the free Community edition is amazing and should be everything you need to get started.
4. Built an Awareness of External Libraries
Python core is robust, and you can do anything you want with it. However, you'll be working with a mess of code for most modern tasks if you don't utilize external libraries. If you've downloaded Anaconda, the python package, you'll already have quite a few libraries that you can work with. One of the most attractive aspects of Python is it's widespread use across so many different fields—which has lead to the presence of VERY robust libraries. I mean, every time I use Python it blows my F****** mind that it is free to use. A quick list of a few libraries that I've found immensely useful, imagining that readers of this forum may be doing similar tasks and find them useful as well:
Beautifulsoup4—This is a web-scraping & parsing library which is very powerful. It will help you scrape data from the web, strip html markup from text, parse XML data, and many many more things.
NLTK—Natural Language Took Kit is a very powerful language analyzing package that will do a lot of like finding keyword density, topical analysis, sentiment analysis, and much much more.
requests— This is a http request library that has support for proxies, custom headers, custom user agents, etc.. and just about anything you'd ever want to do as far as making requests.
Spintax— This library kind of sucks, but is the only available Python library I've found for parsing spintax syntax. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/spintax/. Fails for deeply-nested spintax, but works fine for comment-length texts.
FacePy— https://github.com/jgorset/facepy makes working with Facebook Open Graph easier. Personally, I haven't used it too much but hear positive remarks a lot.
Selenium (Webdriver)— Does browser automation like forum submissions, etc that can't be done via simple http requests. Popular for bots, annoying inefficient for tasks that could otherwise be accomplished via direct http requests.
There are so many libraries out there that chances are you'll find one for anything you're trying to do, there's a library just for it. Once you get started, you'll find that building many of your own libraries becomes second nature.
5. Immerse Yourself
If you're serious about learning Python, or any language, you need to be borderline obsessive about it for several months until you get enough traction to start being able to actually use it. Think about it, dream about it, read about it, and watch YouTube about it. If you are new to programming entirely, I would say it's the best place to start learning. Get on stackexchange.com and start asking questions—you get quick feedback. Other resources that I've found useful are edx.org (especially Harvards CS50 Course, which is entirely free) and pluralsight.com (not free, but inexpensive). Also, there is a publisher called O'Reilly which has a lot of great books about Python, and many are very up-to-date.
As with anything, if you've just a feeling that you'd like to make a change in your life, or that you aren't being quite as clever as you'd like, learning a programming language may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you are prepared to commit yourself to evolving the way you approach your work, and really commit yourself to making a change, Python is a great place to start. I've yet to find a task on a computer that Python hasn't helped with. The ONLY disadvantage to using Python that I could serve up (I'm still relatively new to programming mind you) is that it isn't as efficient as lower-level languages such as C++ or C#. That being said, especially with the availability of computing power and memory these days, that'll never be a practical issue for you. No one I know of uses Python for it's efficiency.
As I said, these are just a few things I wish someone had sat me down and made clear while I started out to learn programming. Some are probably specific for my learning style, and may not be relevant to anyone else. Also, for those with more experience please correct anything I've written that isn't accurate, or may not be the best advice.
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Bluedanger
Junior Member
- Jun 18, 2016
- 131
- 51
All I did when first starting Python was setting a goal or task for my program idea. Example, I wanted to write a password test. So I learned how to print to the screen my text. Then I learned about user input. Then learned IF statements. Each step of way, I googled everything.
After a while, Python gets much easier.
If anyone is really interested in learning Python, I just a youtube called zero to hero with Python. Its like 8 hours long but teaches you programming sesame street style like your kid.
Reading Python was confusing and just didnt hit it home. After this video, I had a great concept and made my learning way easier. Also, a programmer has ways of finding answers (google)
After a while, Python gets much easier.
If anyone is really interested in learning Python, I just a youtube called zero to hero with Python. Its like 8 hours long but teaches you programming sesame street style like your kid.
Reading Python was confusing and just didnt hit it home. After this video, I had a great concept and made my learning way easier. Also, a programmer has ways of finding answers (google)
rolax
Registered Member
- Dec 26, 2016
- 70
- 9
Everybody heard about this programming language.
It has a wide ecosystem, you can find any lib for any needs.
Web-scraping, bots creation, machine learning, image/video processing, seo tools, web-development, high-load projects etc. etc. etc. -> Python can handle it.
I really like this snake
So, Python programmers, why don't we share some tip&tricks, libs and snippets here?
Also we can create a Skype Group, just send me pm.
And feel free to ask any questions, I would be happy to help you.
View attachment 49453
Maybe to keep the thread organized people should start their post (if it's a tip/trick) with some headline like "TIP / TRICK" given that there will be posts with no tips or tricks.
Also, I'd love to be part of the skypegroup!