I recently spent some time working my way through “Learn Python The Hard Way” by Zed A. Shaw. Zed is a programmer who has accomplished more than most in his short time on Earth. He is outspoken and often edgy, and has a reputation for being both brilliant and blunt. Zed is the creator of the Mongrel server engine that powers many Ruby on Rails sites.
Zed comes off as a Hard Ass, more than anything, and his proposed methodology to learn programming is hard, as in hard assed, not hard as in difficult. Learn Python The Hard Way is old school. Which is good, because I am old. It reminds me of learning Fortran in my freshman year of college in 1980. Hollerith cards. 039 keypunch machines. All batch processing. When you are dealing with “physical” cards, and physical sorting of program steps, and waiting an hour to see if your code compiled, let alone executed to completion or got a correct answer you tend to do alot more “desk checking” than we do today. That is the thing that I like about LPTHW is that it teaches some technique around old school desk checking. Like reading your code backwards to find errors, something that we often did on green bar paper at a table at Helmut’s Alpine Kitchen at two o’clock in the morning with a pot of coffee and an order of biscuits and gravy.Continue Reading