Learning Python

Over Thanksgiving I had nowhere to be, no family to spend time with. So I decided to learn python for the first time. I heard so many great things about it.

One particular person who influenced me to teach myself python was Chris Shin. Chris is a great friend whom I met during CSE 154, as a TA. Chris is a brilliant, warm hearted person. He told me once that he came to a point where he can only code in python. That got me thinking. “What is this so called python that everyone is talking about?”

I remember during INFO 344, Alex Belltown, another great friend that I admire used it for scraping data from wikipedia. He told me about it a few times, but I was not interested too much in actually learning at that time.

So back to Thanksgiving, I purchased a Udemy course for $10 which was originally $95. The instructor was really clear and easy to follow. Currently I am learning to use the ‘lambda’ expression which I don’t fully understand, but works really well. I installed jupiter notebook on my macbook pro to interact with python. So far the assignments are really interesting.

I am learning how to make classes and functions, starting from the basics. I am trying my best to finish the intro course in a week so I can start on my next serious on data structures and interview questions in python. My ultimate goal in learn python is to make python my primary programming language which I can write day to day things on.

Sally Li also told me about django which is another component which I can use python to hook up to server-side projects. This will be my next step after finishing the algorithm serious.