My Experience With LPTHW

I’ve been meaning to get my hands dirty with Python for a while and finally found the motivation to go through Learn Python the Hard Way over the holidays. I knew going into it that it wasn’t necessarily the he best way to ramp up on the language for someone with years of development experience, but it was a vacation week and I didn’t want anything too intense. Plus, the simple rote exercises allowed me the excuse to break some bad typing habits.

In the end I found it enjoyable. The writing style is very easy to read and straight to the point. Zed Shaw doesn’t waste any words pontificating on useless topics nor does he pull any punches against some of the nonsensical entrenched beliefs spouted in many Python forums and FAQs.

With that in mind I think my favorite exercise of the bunch was #44 where he discusses style, formatting and the importance of comments. Sage advice but not so didactic that it inhibits you from developing your own style. In fact, his recommendation to the reader to develop their own style is something I wish someone had told me 20 years ago!

I diligently went through all of the exercises, even the “hello world” simple ones but while I read all of the Extra Credit items I rarely did any of them — I just didn’t see the benefit. And one thing about the exercises that is probably a great teaching tool but that I personally hated is that they are mostly comprised of reading and debugging someone else’s code. I know those exercises are good for me but I still hate doing it. I guess it’s like eating my broccoli.

Overall the program progresses steadily to more difficult tasks until you reach the exercises towards the end that have you constructing a Zork-like word game and ends with implementing your game on a web framework. It’s a fun project and just enough challenge.

I’ve always heard Python was an easy language to read and I certainly agree with that assessment and I really like the indenting requirement since I generally write in that style anyhow. However, even at the end, I’m still having a serious challenge not ending a line with a semi-colon. After years of C#, PHP and Javascript terminating with a semi-colon is habitual.

My next step is to build something meaningful. I plan on reversing myself and picking up the project I mentioned some weeks ago that I planned on abandoning. I don’t have hopes of it making any money but it is simple enough that it could be built without any big technical hurdles and it’ll give me a chance not only to play with Python and Django but some other goodies such as NoSQL. Looks like I have my New Year’s Resolution all laid out.