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Learn Python The Hard Way (by zed shaw) http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

The online HTML version is free

Learn Python The Hard Way was the first programming book I ever read. Beats the hell out of codeacademy and all that other shit.

The idea behind "The Hard Way" is that it's hard because you have to do all the legwork the book prescribes in order to get much out of it. It really has nothing to do with being hard because the concepts it teaches are difficult to grok.

Ask HN: I want to learn how to code. Can anyone tell me how to start learning?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2699965

Learn Python The Hard Way: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/

Absolutely. Learn Python The Hard Way spawned a couple of similar books that Zed Shaw maintains at http://learncodethehardway.org . I'm working through Python, but look forward to him finishing up his one for C and working through that after I get comfortable in Python and get some programming under my belt.

Learn Python The Hard Way is not the best book to start programming with; it's better suited to people who already know how to code and want to learn Python. Python For Non-Programmers is my recommendation: it has stood the test of time pretty well and it introduces things in a nice gentle way. It's linked to from the Python homepage, I seem to remember, and there are PDF and HTML versions.

Experienced programmers forget what it's like to be inexperienced. You need to generalise and don't dwell on the things you don't understand. Effectively, the only way to really learn how to programme is to do it because you enjoy it. As you pile on the experience, you'll learn everything you need to learn out of sheer curiosity. When you're experienced you DO want to understand every single line of code, because that's what interests you. As a beginner, the magic of seeing something come to life, even if you don't fully understand it is often enough. That's certainly how I felt when I started out all those years ago.

Rails is awesome too -- not least of all because 'Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails' is one of the very best programming books written. It's actually readable. Rails is a fantastic tool that lets you to create first-class web applications without needing to know everything about the framework upfront. That means you get results fast, and you learn the details only when the time is right. You also learn some very valuable conventions to do with code organisation, testing, DRY etc that so many corporate programmers never seemed to have grasp (and are never going to be great programmers as a result).

Also, if you seriously want to learn, don't follow HN. Get programming and get in the zone. Every minute spent reading stuff like this is a minute lost.

Dive Into Python is a good start, you can find it at:

- http://www.diveintopython.net/toc/index.html

Of course you can also just buy the book.

If you're a bit more familiar to programming, try Zed Shaw's Learn Python The Hard Way:

- http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

Though 'The Hard Way' is obviously not for the novice completely new to programming it does teach a bit more than just the language, things that make you into a better coder.

You'll also find a comprehensive list at:

- http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers

When first learning python (Shaw's The Hard Way maybe), it suggested this idiom as python's ternary operator:

    boolean and true_branch or false_branch

and explained that boolean=true would make it check and return true_branch, while false makes it check the other side of the or.

This is parallel to the standard C one. I'm surprised no one has mentioned it, but I guess that makes sense because it's not very explicit about what it's doing, which goes agains the spirit of python. Probably not very common for python programmers to use.