My Google Plus feed for Makeuseof recently had a nice guide to help when preparing for a programming interview. It also featured links to some websites to practice coding, such as:
Project Euler
CodinGame
/r/DailyProgrammer on Reddit
I’ll add these to my arsenal of learning programming resources. 🙂
Thankyou to StudyWebDevelopment.com for the 3 website suggestions:
Wow! Actually, my exact words were “Oh my gaad!” or something; that was what I said when I started the next section at the start of my Freecodecamp journey – HTML elements. My surprise was at the big resources page called Let’s Explore the Universe of Programming which seems to have a ton of links to loads of free programming books and even free University courses!
This blog post is being written in the time I’ve set aside for “learning to code”. The philosophy I picked up from a Youtube video that featured Freecodecamp was to aim to do 25 minutes of coding a day; and to do 3 days in a row. Then 3 weeks in a row and then 3 months in a row. This is especially if you really want to code but you are finding it hard to get started or to focus etc.
It’s the first day of my second block of 3 days and I still haven’t actually done any coding yet! But, I have installed Gitter on my smartphone and joined the chatroom for Freecodecamp (don’t forget the Facebook page and the local clubs list with links to the Cardiff and Chepstow clubs and the FCC subreddit). So, in my last few minutes I am going to look at the first proper tutorial (which looks pretty easy if you’ve done lots of HTML before).
But I will definitely be going back and looking at the free Uni courses linked via FCC. But next I have to join the forum. And check The Changelog – a podcast all about opensource.
Ooh! Almost forgot to link the Github Readme on the main page.
The Fullstack Python site has a page dedicated purely to Flask resources and tutorials. With links to the Mega Tutorial and many others – there seems to be an emphasis on guides that get you to make real projects.
Flask is a Python web framework – I haven’t yet tried it myself. After trying Django with the Django Girls tutorial (actually, I haven’t completed the last proper section yet – Django Forms). From what I’ve read about Flask it sounds like it is smaller and more “Pythonic”. For a definition of that word, the Secret Weblog recommends that you type import this into a Python interpreter.. I just tried it and it works.
Code Visually also recommend Full Stack Python and carlos.bueno has a long page about what it means to be a full stack programmer.
Credit: I have borrowed the Flask + Unicorn image from Charles Leifer’s Python blog who also has a post about building a Flask app in an hour (or less).
Today I learned about the use of a “conditional main program” when programming Python. I read about this in a great Python tutorial PDF from Southampton Uni.
You may write some code that is only intended to be used as a module for another program. So if you try running the module directly you may well get no output or response. But, if you include the code below
if __name__ == " __main__ " :
and if you include some functionality to this function, you will get some handy output. It means you can run a module as its own program. You could get it to give some instructions about the correct use of the actual program or use it as an example of what the main program is supposed to do.
Go to page 73 of the PDF for a better explanation! Or this blog post about the same topic.
And here is a page about Spyder and part of a book on computational programming that also covers Spyder.
Thankyou to Mr. Jobcentre guy for pointing me in the direction of the free courses on the Open University such as these two tagged with “Python”.