my tips are the exact opposite:
- go with what’s easy for typing - you DON’T want to master the editor and python simultaneously! Editors have their own language for programming them - emacs has lisp, vi has vimscript and now perl/python but vi is modal so.. I use Kate BUT I would like to start with something with AutoComplete of the stdlib and an IDE is great assuming you can find one that works - lol
- Don’t waste your time implementing sort and algorithms initially! again, that’s a seperate area of study.
- Just start with Beazley and do the first 10-11 chapters - at least 2 passes AND MAKE brief NOTES BECAUSE you will forget it all.
- Then go read the documentation on the python website! There’s loads of it but you will get a much clearer understanding of how python works. (this is way too voluminous so start with the PEPs)
- By this point you will keep bumping into use of standard library so that has to be mastered. (again Beazley has a book on it) especially **re and it’s match-object
** - By this time you will be dead or would have given up on python start looking for a job that uses python
it’s a big and complicated language.. so try to make use of it - you will realize how ignorant you are - things you assumed about it will need to be corrected - make notes
(the important ideas are on how to use classes because python can be used like C - functional programming or like OOPS and here concepts like MixingClasses and MRO lookup and overloading start to bite you in the arse) (Beazley is a great book but you’ll realize it’s doesn’t cover a lot it’s still the world’s best book on python - you got to actually try to write a program - I found wrting website scraping tools to be pretty useful because it involves program design) (also remember that in OOPS you have to create a vocabulary to describe your program - in C you do that clunkily using Abstraction so part of your effort with classes is to create words that are used in your program to do whatever it is you are trying to do) - python idioms - try to take a look at them - Eckel has a few
You will need to understand unicode btw and the difference between encoding, character-set, glyphs - I found usenet’s python groups very helpful but you got to read Beazley first