Resources
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
- Benjamin Franklin
Codecademy
After seeing Python for the first time in a Rasberry pi book i wanted to explore it more. My first venture in to this was a Python 2 course on Codecademy.
I enjoyed working on Codecademy and there were a lot of free courses, but when I moved from it I found it difficult to put what I had learnt in to practice.
This was because it was browser based, not in an IDE, and there was no real experience, of building fully working programs and debugging them.
Free Code Camp
This is a well known site which I have been dipping in and out of over time.
At present I have restarted the tutorials with the hope of following it through to the end, increasing my skills, experience and adding more projects to my resume.
The format is similar to codecademy in that it is browser based training but all the tutorials are free, and some are tutor lead videos which are great.
Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
Discovering this site was an eye-opener to the power of python, and putting it in to practice felt empowering.
Walking through the instructions and practice exercises and trying some of the projects is very rewarding and the skills it teaches are practical and useful.
There is an accompanying course on udemy, and the author Al Sweigart has several other ebooks on other aspects of Python.
CS50
EDX is a site offering full quality free courses provided by universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale. Paid options are available for certification. This is where I found out about CS50, which is a Computer Science course offered by Harvard, updated annually.
This is by far the best course I have ever taken and I learnt more from this than I did from my degree. The course is brilliantly presented by David Malan, with some in course mini tutor lead tutorials as part of the learning journey.
CS50 starts from the beginning, what is programming, taking you through HTML, CSS, Javascript, C, Python and other aspects of web development, including using Flask and Django. There are other spin off courses, another which I started was CS50 2, focusing on web programming.
Youtube Tutorials
There are a gazillion courses on youtube for anything you want to learn, if you dont mind the ads. I found the courses offered by Qazi of Clever Programmer, and also by Mosh Hamedani very well presented and easy to follow.
They both offer a range of courses including Python and Javascipt which I found very useful. The full courses have a lot in them but taking them was very worthwhile and again rewarding to work through.
Exercism
Exercism is a great place to practice and upgrade your skills, giving you challenges to complete in up to 61 different programming languages.
When you have completed each challenge you can then view how others completed the same task, to compare different ways of solving the same problem.
It also gives you the opportunity to mentor others, which was the main reason I joined it, but as yet I have not availed of this opportunity
Spotify Podcasts
Spotify is great for leaning when you are driving and not able to actually code. Podcasts provided me with insights into the coding world that I did not get from tutorials or Degree study.
I tried to listen to audio versions of programming books on audible, which instructed on how to program, but it was impossible as it was reading character by character lines of program.
With podcasts I listened to people in the industry talk about how they learned to code, the languages, the tools, the obstacles and general life as a programmer. This was much more valuable.
GitHub
If your in to programming you will be familiar with github, me, I’m new to it and still exploring. At present I am using it to store some of my work, which is one of its main purposes.
The other main purpose is collaboration, which I have not yet used it for. Collaboration experience is something that employers are looking for, therefore I am eager to use this facility on github. I am using the tools above to learn more about this before I will be confident enough to do this.
Visual Studio
Previously I have used Netbeans for Java programming and Eclipse for Android programming, among other IDEs, but currently I am using Visual Studio to do my Python programs, working with Django.
I find Visual Studio to be similar to Netbeans and therefore picked it up quite easily It is also widely used in software development so being familiar and comfortable with using it adds strength to my cv.
