Learning to Program with Python

Some people think Python is a good first language for beginning programmers.  That might be so.  It has been around for a while so there is significant support for it, which includes the book Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner.  There is also Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science (2nd Ed.) by John Zelle.  There are many books and many on-line resources for Python.

Python is free.  You can download it and install it very easily.  It runs on Linux and on Windows.  It has an interactive interface you can use to test pilot Python statements, very much like the interface that Scheme provides.  This type of interface is called a REPL (read-evaluate-print loop).  Python does not require a compiler, so that is one less thing to worry about.

Here is an article, Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner, where a professional programmer mentors someone who wants to learn programming.  This blog article mentions a free Open Course-Ware class from MIT (course number 6.00) that teaches an introduction to programming using Python.

There are three paradigms for programming:  (1) procedural programming, (2) object-oriented programming, and (3) functional programming.  You can use Python for either procedural programming or object-oriented programming.  I think it is best to learn programming with the procedural programming paradigm.

The  Python programming language is here to stay.  Whether you begin to learn programming with Python or with Basic, you will have a beginner's language that you will be able to continue using for a long time.  It some respects, it is a matter of taste or circumstance that will lead you to pick one language or the other as a first language.  If you pick Python, and you can find someone you know who is using Python or who wants to learn it with you, find out the people you know are using Python 2 or Python 3.  You will want to use the version your support group is using.

Robert

Here are previous articles by my on Python:
Installing Python  October 13, 2012
Notepad++ and Python October 13, 2012