There are many ways to improve your Python skills. We suggest an incremental learning approach. Learn through practice. Start with small examples. Slowly increase the level of difficulty of these examples.
While learning through examples, feel free to copy code and make changes. The core concepts to start with in Python (like many of high-level languages) are:
- Input/output
- Variables and data types
- Assignment, Comparison
- Arithmetic, Logical and String operations
- Iteration
- Using functions
- Creating your own functions for reuse
When you become comfortable with the use of a minimal set of core language features, you will start your self-learning journey.
You may wonder why we teach functions early in the learning process. Functions show you how to reuse code. They make your programs smaller so that you can do more with less..
An important step in learning is assessing your conceptual knowledge. You can do this by taking tests with open questions. Open questions are more challenging because they encourage you to think in terms of association of concepts. For example, if the term is “concatenation” you can think of strings and lists.
We use an open test for assessing yourself and also learning from your peers. It works like this.
- We will prompt you with a Python term/concept.
- You can respond with multiple related terms.
- If you don’t know the term, you can skip it (and learn it later)
In the assessment, we are not looking for one correct answer. We are looking to see what related concepts a particular Python term evokes. We want to unearth the associations you come up with, given a term.
At the end of the test we provide a tag cloud for each test term (we call them triggers). We also provide a link to examples so that you can learn more.
Want to assess your knowledge? Please register here.
