> "To become really good at anything, you have to practice and repeat, practice and repeat, until the technique becomes intuitive." - Paulo Coelho
> “You become a master in what you repeatedly do in consistency. Mastery is not born; it is acquired. It is not blood-linked; it is skill-learnt! “- Israelmore Ayivor
> “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee
This article is about mastering the Python programming language in most effective and efficient way. The steps shown here are very similar to the previous article I wrote about mastering JavaScript. You can find the previous article about JavaScript here.
Python is a language has syntax that is easy to understand. However mastering the language is another thing. The best and recommended way to master Python is through consistent practice and more practice until it becomes second nature.
However for you to practice Python in a manner that will lead to mastery, you have to fulfil some requirements as described below.
Step 1. Have you why for learning Python, it is easier to learn and understand something that you have passion about. Check out the documentation and code examples to get a feel for what is up ahead. Try some online tutorials or books. You can also use freely available eBooks on the internet
Step 2. Create time for study and time for practice. If you can’t allocate ample time for study, it will be very hard to move along.
Step 3. Learn the history of the language, why it was created, when it was created? , for whom and by whom was it created? Also learn its syntax, use cases and real life examples where Python is in use. Answering these questions will help you to know the strengths, weaknesses and peculiarity of Python. You should know that there is no perfect programming language.
Step 4. Learn the following concepts: For introduction understand how python works, environment and tools, and its comparison with other programming language. Write a hello world program. Learn input/output functions in Python, data types and variable declarations, python statements, operators (arithmetic, logical and comparison operators). Python conditionals (if statement, ifelse, if elif else and nesting of conditionals). Looping with for and while statement. Python collections namely; lists, tuples, sets and dictionaries. Python functions, classes and modules.
Step 5. Read Python documentation, blogs, watch online tutorial videos, read eBooks. The aim is to expose you to many scenarios where other people might be able to explain some concepts which you can’t grasp on your own.
Step 6. Participate actively in online Python forums, hackathons and other online activities. You can also form your own physical or virtual groups. Participate in open source projects and collaborate as much as possible. You can also participate in projects individually or as a group.
Step 7. Keep up with Python Enhancement Proposals (PEP). PEPs are documents that describe new proposals of the Python language. PEP8 for example provides guidelines and best practices for writing readable code.
This means new features are being added to the language to make it better and add more functionality. In that regard you have to keep abreast of any changes.
If you are psyched to get started with Python, visit my article Introduction to Modern Python
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