On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 3:07 PM, Bryan Dietz <bdietz400@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ran across this have not gone thru yet, but the price seems right:
https://developers.google.com/edu/python/
The price is certainly right - it's the same price as a lot of other
Python learning materials. ;)
I looked through it very quickly (that is, not very carefully) and
found it's generally pretty good. There are a handful of places where
it's slightly clunky or confusing or outdated.
A few examples:
(1) The biggest one for me is that, being a Google internal document,
it (mostly) adheres to Google internal style guides, such as indenting
two spaces. The overwhelming convention in the non-Google Python
community is four spaces.
(2) There is at least one mention of "python 3000", which is an old
name for Python 3.
(3) The "commands" module mentioned in the utilities section is
specifically tailored to Unix or Linux, and doesn't work on Windows or
IBM i. And it's deprecated on all platforms.
(4) Probably what should be the biggest issue for folks who have no
prior experience with Python is that it is expressly a tutorial for
Python 2. It mentions that learning either Python 2 or 3 lets you pick
up the other without much difficulty, and I agree with this; but if
you are truly just starting out in the language and are relying on
being able to type in the examples, letter-for-letter, without full
understanding yet, you have to be sure you are using the version
matched with the tutorial (or whatever examples you find in the wild),
otherwise you'll introduce an unnecessary source of confusion and
frustration.
There are other small issues as well, but overall it's one of the
better "learn Python quick" tutorials.
John Y.
midrange.com
