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Beginner Guides For Python?
Professor Snugglesworth
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I started my first class toward a certificate in Information Security this week. The bulk of this class is centered around learning Python.
I know there are hundreds of Python guides and tutorials, including the material given to us in the textbook. However, as an extra bit of insurance, I wanted to ask what was typically considered the easiest to learn Python guides out there. I'm talking about the super easy to learn, idiot-proof stuff for people like myself who never touched the program before. That also includes the numerous app games out there that trivialize this stuff.
On the subject, I was also wondering what kind of entry level jobs would be available to someone who learns Python. If it's possible to get a job after finishing this class alone, I would like to know about it. I'm told companies tend to value experience with these programs, so if there are opportunities to get my foot in the door, I would like to learn about them.
And lastly, I was also wondering if there was a recommended path to learning these programs based on your prior knowledge. Basically, learning Python means I can more easily wrap my head around X program, and doing that lets me have the knowledge to move onto Y, etc.
I know there are hundreds of Python guides and tutorials, including the material given to us in the textbook. However, as an extra bit of insurance, I wanted to ask what was typically considered the easiest to learn Python guides out there. I'm talking about the super easy to learn, idiot-proof stuff for people like myself who never touched the program before. That also includes the numerous app games out there that trivialize this stuff.
On the subject, I was also wondering what kind of entry level jobs would be available to someone who learns Python. If it's possible to get a job after finishing this class alone, I would like to know about it. I'm told companies tend to value experience with these programs, so if there are opportunities to get my foot in the door, I would like to learn about them.
And lastly, I was also wondering if there was a recommended path to learning these programs based on your prior knowledge. Basically, learning Python means I can more easily wrap my head around X program, and doing that lets me have the knowledge to move onto Y, etc.
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Consider getting a lynda.com membership and going through the 6+ hour intro to python by Bill Weinman. It is clear, concise, explains why things are the way they are with visual guidance through the whole process, and it is the kind of thing you could run on a tablet or a small window on your desktop while you plug away in the IDE of your choice (they use eclipse, I used Pycharm).
If you have any kind of OOP background, you will catch on real quick. It is a clean, easy to read language.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
http://learnpythonthehardway.org
I second the recommendation of PyCharm.
Don't forget to learn a web framework too. Django or Flask are the two big ones in Python.
Here's a flask tutorial: http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial-part-i-hello-world
Data munging is also a task you'll need to accomplish. Taking input in some form and generating output in another (usually sorted and reduced) form.
Scrapy is a module which can crawl the web and put web content into a data structure for you to parse through, which is helpful if you need to maintain a whole bunch of metadata for tv shows for example.
Boto is an Amazon AWS framework which allows you to interface with all of their services. You should know it exists at least, but don't bother jumping into it until you get beyond the beginner stuff.
In my experience, I have not seen Python used beyond systems engineering or science/math data processing. I don't know of any major projects outside of maybe reddit that are all about python (edit: i'm told instagram and pinterest use django). So if you don't want to be a sysadmin, Java (Spring MVC, Hibernate, Map Reduce, Netflix's libraries on GitHub) would take you farther in the enterprise web world. Python is definitely an easier first language to learn vs Java, however.
https://github.com/BrightcoveOS/Diamond is a cool project IMO. It's a daemon that you would run on all of your servers to gather metrics to report to Graphite.
With regard to Security, a lot of the tools that ship with Kali Linux are written in Python.
Also a criticism I have of python is that it's very easy to use without deeply understanding the language. This can be seen as a good thing, but often I find it just results in a lot of gotchas when performance issues come into play. Learn mutable vs immutable types, how a list differs from a tuple, why "pass by reference vs pass by value" is kind of a misnomer, and know when to use multiprocessing vs threading.