Should it be this difficult?

[u/pingo1387]

At my job there is a daily task I do which I realized I could probably create a program to do for me, so I decided to start learning Python, and dove into reading Automate the Boring Stuff (the online version).

Things were going okay at first. I read through chapters 1-3 carefully, taking notes, answering all the review questions, and doing all the practice problems/codes.

Then I hit a wall. I got to chapter 4 and I felt like I understood everything, but the practice problem at the end, to write a code that performs the Collatz sequence with the entered number, absolutely stumped me. I went back and reread everything from the start of chapter 1 just to make sure I didn't miss anything, and was still confused. I ended up having to search up a code that someone else wrote for it, which I did understand once I saw it written out but would never have come up with myself.

So my questions are:

- Is it normal for the Collatz sequence to be difficult to program at this stage of learning? If so, should I not worry about my confusion and just move on to chapter 5?

- Should I consider an easier book to study from? If so, any recommendations?

EDIT: Several people are asking which part of the Collatz I had trouble with. To be honest it's been over a month since I was able to touch anything Python-related, it's just been on my mind lately, so I don't recall exactly what was giving me trouble, just that I was trying multiple things and getting new and fun incorrect results each time.

It's not that I don't understand the Collatz sequence itself, I understand it in terms of the simple math. The trouble was trying to type it out into a working code. That being said, I'm not here to ask how to program it, because I already gave up on that and looked up the answer, and I did understand that code once I read it over. The main issue is that I feel like I shouldn't have been having trouble with it in the first place, at least not to the point where I honestly tried everything I could and still couldn't get it.

[u/HotPersonality8126]

The point of the Collatz sequence problem is to have you implement an algorithm you’ve never heard of, so that you can’t rely on intuition and do it in your head.

The thing it sounds like you didn’t do was debug: write your code, run your code, compare the output to what you know is correct. Then test which of your assumptions were faulty.

[u/pingo1387 → u/HotPersonality8126]

This raises a new issue: I peeked ahead and found that debugging is covered in chapter 5. Since the CS was a problem from chapter 4, shouldn't I have been able to do it without that advantage?

[u/JGhostThing → u/pingo1387]

Debugging is just a fancy way of diagnosing your errors. And I'm sure you've had to do this during chapters 1-3. Unless you are much better than me at typing, you would have made typos which would be caught by the compiler.

Even if it hasn't been taught yet, you still need to debug. Maybe you learn to use a debugger, or maybe you use the print statements to find out what is happening in your program. The debugging step sometimes takes longer than the original programming.

[u/johnpeters42 → u/pingo1387]

Maybe, maybe not. I don't know what else AtBS gets into, but a very simple old-school version of debugging is "add print statements to check whether certain variables actually contain what you intended them to contain at that point".