A friend of mine is a social worker, with a cool hacker spirit, but not at all versed into computers.
She wants to learn programming.
I figured (from what i gathered around) that Python is a good language for learning as it has the just right amount of constraints, and that its constraints are actually useful for programming in other languages…
What sort of resources would you recommend to her? A book in particular? A guide/Howto or online course?
Thanks!
#AskingForAFriend
I think my first resource on Python was A Byte of Python. However, I’d probably rather start with a statically typed language.
If you are willing to teach your friend personally I’d suggest starting with illustrating basic algorithms and datastructures with a pen on paper. This helped me much more than anything else when I startetd programming.
I always found freeCodeCamp.org’s video tutorials to be the best ones out there for beginners, so if your friend prefers learning stuff on video I’d suggest two videos:
Introduction to Programming and Computer Science if your friend wants to grasp the concept of a programming language and the really basic “whats” and “whys”. I watched only the first ten minutes and it talked enough about what is a programming language. However I don’t think it is obligatory, since these concepts are easy to grasp as you go (at least that’s how it went for me when I was learning by myself).
The actual Python one is Learn Python - Full Course for Beginners, which does introduce how to setup and write Python, as well as programming concepts.
Both of them are pretty long. At least for me, I didn’t ever felt the need to watch/read a full tutorial, since I always learned new stuff while searching on the web or watching specific tutorials for it (I remember I couldn’t understand what and how for loops worked, so I tried to search and learn about them specifically).
Again, it really depends on the way your friend prefers to learn.