Appreciation Post: Explaining how to read the Python documentation

[swati]

Thank you for recognising and acknowledging that the Python documentation looks overly technical and scary…and mostly unintelligible to beginning coders. I think this has been the single reason I have given up learning to code many times in my past: everyone just tells me to go read the documentation but this was the first time a lesson explained that most of the arguments in a function (say open()) were constant functions and what that even meant. I always ended up feeling dumb and then eventually quitting.

Learning to code for me has been like people describe how it is to quit smoking: I’ve tried it a hundred times…and failed.

[alvinctk]

Documentation has too many jargons. You should follow this path that I have listed below. Consult documentation when in doubt.

1. Read the Zen of Python

Additional Resources Wiki

1. Read the Zen of Python
   On the python interpreter do the following:

>>> import this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than right now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea – let’s do more of those!

2. Watch the lecture on “Transforming Code into Beautiful Idiomatic Python” by Raymond Hettinger.

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My notes on Transforming Code into Beautiful Idiomatic Python
Common examples on transforming code into idiomatic Python.

3. Read Google Python Style Guide. Great with examples on what not to do (cons or bad) and what to do (pros or good).

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Read Google Python style guide
http://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html

4. Read Python Official PEP 8 Style Guide

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Read Python PEP 8 style guide
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

5. Read Python Official Tutorial. You can select specific version.

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Python 3.7 Tutorial by Python Documentation

6. Supplement Python education class by Google

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Google For Education - Python

7. Other additional resources (that will be updated and) found at Additional Resources Wiki.

Real Python explains really well.

Additional Resources Wiki

• Google For Education - Python
• Python 3.7 Tutorial by Python Documentation
• Real Python
• Python Tutorials by techbeamers
• Other Tutorials by techbeamers
• Hacker Earth Programming Tutorial and Practice Problems