#thinkpython

A friend of mine who is a senior developer sat down with me and spent some time telling me about all of the different routes I could take in terms of learning to code. He gave me a book on coding in Python. He gave me a few different reasons why it was a good place to start. Below are his multiple bullet points as to why he steered me in that direction

1. It’s not as verbose as Java

2. It’s incredibly easy to setup your development environment and start writing code. (This is important for people who have no prior knowledge of programming languages. 

3. In his experience, statically typed languages like Java are frustrating for beginners. But you’ll learn how awesome they are down the road. Python is a dynamically typed language so it’s easier for smaller projects.

4.There’s a huge huge huge community out there for leaning Python

5. Python abstracts away and hides A LOT of complicated computer science concepts from the programmer. So you don’t need (at first) understand what’s the difference between a LinkedList and ArrayList. Python picks the right one for you. Later on, it’s absolutely essential to understand what’s going on under the hood though. 

Another friend of mine who is a developer did warn me to move on quickly after learning it, as there are some bad habits you can pick up. In fact, that list essentially what my friend gave to me by way of text when he heard that my other friend was challenging his choice. 

I don’t want to get too distracted by where to begin, so I’m diving in. 

All of that aside, the book is Think Python by Allen Downey.  Below’s the link.