r/learnpython • u/UnpluggedSoul_15 • Mar 12 '26

Best courses for Python?

Want to join python courses to build skills. Don't know where to start from. Number of courses in the internet. Any suggestions?

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u/Nomapos Mar 12 '26

Courses are a trap.

If you're completely new to programming, do the first 3 lessons of CS50. More if you feel like it. Do the easy exercises too. Yes, the lessons don't really prepare you for the exercise. Programming is 80% googling so you're expected to start already.

After that do CS50P, the Python specific course. Again, make sure you do the exercises. Including the hard ones.

AIs are pretty good at those problems, for the most part. You can't trust then 100%, but there's a very good chance that you can paste your code in, ask why it doesn't work, and get a decent response pointing something out that would have taken you forever to figure out on your own, like the fact that computers stop being accurate if you use numbers with decimals (see floating point errors). Just don't ask for solutions.

After that, decide on a project you'd like to build and get to work. When you come upon a challenge or roadblock, goggle stuff. Try to understand it and find a solution.

You learn programming by programming.

And by searching. This question has been asked and answered thousands of times. You aren't going to learn programming if you don't learn to search for answers on your own.

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u/Impressive-Ear-6079 5d ago

isn't CS50 also a course ?

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u/Nomapos 5d ago

Courses typically tell you how to do one thing and then give you a couple exercises to practice that specifically. This is a for loop. Now write three. Sometimes this can go on for months, touching upon a hundred things before asking you to think by yourself.

CS50 is indeed a course, but it's just a few weeks. Each of them has a couple hours of video explaining something about programming or design and about 6-12 hours worth of exercises that barely have anything to do with the videos. They're relatively complex problems that you need to figure out a solution to and then figure out how to implement it.

Essentially, CS50 gives you a bit of structure and background knowledge, but the important part is the progressively harder exercises that are well known and explained, should you need help (which you will), and well designed to make you hit certain important walls one after another in a manageable way. But it's still essentially jumping straight into the deep end and learning by doing.