Like I had mentioned in my post from a few days ago, I’ve been dabbling in Python as a way to expand my knowledge of web apps — a lot of large scale web apps were created using Python as a flexible back end. One example that comes to mind is reddit.
Not-So-Oddly enough, I found LearnPython.org on reddit’s r/learnpython and r/python subreddits. Both are great resources for people like me, who are otherwise clueless and resort to googling for tutorials (an underrated skill). Actually-oddly-enough, I found LearnPython.org to be quite a pain in the butt for a newbie Python programmer for a number of different reasons:
- They teach, but the examples often contain concepts that have not been explained to the user yet. This is frustrating, but I suppose it teaches you to have the Python reference handy. After faithfully following the tutorials in order*, I had on more than one occasion come across a new concept which had no relation to the lesson at hand.
- I think the website is broken*. I had been following the lessons in order, but I think some of them were skipped by the “jump to next lesson” system. I suppose this could be my answer to problem #1.
- The website is actually broken. Case in point: One, Two, Three. The site doesn’t say why these are down, nor does it handle the error pages nicely. It makes me think that the concept itself is not important enough to learn — I mean, if the site has it listed but the page isn’t working, maybe I’m lead to believe that it’s a feature of Python that was removed in Python 3 vs 2 or something.
In conclusion, I like to ramble about poorly executed tutorial series. You brought my hopes up and made me sad, LearnPython.
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