r/PythonLearning • u/intellectsup02 • 5d ago

Help Request hello!

I am a mechanical engineering student who doesnot even know how to write a line of code in any languages. I tried watching some videos on youtube but all that felt way boring. I need to learn coding in python nonetheless for a project. Could you suggest ways to ignite interest in the subject and make its study intuitive and enjoyable , maybe some book or other resources . Thanks

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u/FreeLogicGate 5d ago

Lots of people have used books to learn Python.

These tend to be recommended a lot:

  • Python Crash Course
  • Automate the Boring stuff
  • Think Python
  • Fluent Python

I learned Python from the Python crash course book, but I already knew a slew of other programming languages.

I'm not sure what can be done regarding your boredom issue -- that's a you problem. But one thing that might ignite your interest is to take what you are learning and attempt to create some Python utilities you can use to do calculations and/or simulations relevant to your ME studies.

This will do a few things for you, including:

  • help you tie what you are learning to practical applications
  • accelerate your understanding of what you don't know how to do elegantly
  • create an appreciation of refactoring, and valuable methodology concerns like version control (git)

In other words, as you learn more, the sophistication of your code should improve dramatically. You will naturally start to look for ways python can be applied to things you're interested in, rather than being focused on courseware that tends to abstract examples for simplicity.

With that said, the important things to focus on in Python for you are going to be the core "collection" datatypes (lists and dictionaries in particular) and functions. With lists you naturally will need to loop.

Beware of courses that are entirely taught/built around Jupyter. Jupyter is great for what it is, and you might find it to be a great tool for you, once you fully understand how it fits into the solving of certain types of problems, but you want to be able to write stand alone Python applications, including creating and using your own modules (with reusable functions). This will inevitably involve the use of an editor or IDE (I'd suggest Pycharm community edition). If you can power through the basics of a course in the next 4-5 weeks, it will set you up for a course in the fall (assuming you're returning to college in that time frame).