Any Python developers on here? Or UX developers?

How you finding Learning Python the hard way, I started off really well then have slowly faded as I find that I don't have the time to sit and go through the book. Was wondering if an online course would be better.?

Yeah has been great. Really useful as I've been travelling at the same time.

I'm going to start learning Python.
I've seen a few web sites and books mentioned throughout the forum.

Any tips? Good books/apps/web sites?

I used codecademy years ago and I really liked it. But it looks like they have gone freemium now and I'm not sure how much is still available and if there are better alternatives.

My general advise is to get the basics and then try to find something you can apply your skills to, I learned a lot doing the Advent of Code, what's nice about that is that there's a reddit full of solutions so when you've made something that works you can look up how others have solved it, and if you're stuck there's something to fall back on. There's also stuff like Code Combat (which I hated but I've never been much of a gamer) or home automation stuff.

Looking at other's work made me realise how hacky a lot of the things I was doing were, the main pitfall as a self-taught coder (or at least for me) is to just use the basic skills to solve everything and never discover more elegant and efficient ways of going about things.

Using an IDE like PyCharm is really helpful in testing and giving formatting suggestions.

With PyCharm (or other IDE's) it will underline code that is incorrect or missing key formatting elements - it also makes executing your code easy for testing and gives a bit more feedback which is really helpful when learning

I think something that helped me learn is having a problem to solve, I don't/can't learn well from reading a tutorial or book so having a problem and working out how to get a result was key for me to learning it - eventually incorporating more complex ideas and methods as I went on

Ah, two very useful answers.
Thanks!

home automation stuff

This might be my first goal. I studied electronic engineering for a while after school before heading in a totally different direction. I still think I'd like to do more hardware/electronics stuff so IoT and messing around with Raspberry Pi kinda appeals to me atm.

messing around with Raspberry Pi

When I last did this sort of stuff MicroPython had just been released, it should be fairly mature by now. It allows you to use (a slightly different variant of) Python on microcontrollers such as the ESP8266 and ESP32. They're a fraction of the cost of a Pi and more suitable for embedding in stuff, generally you'd use a Pi as a base station and ESPs around the house. The hardest part about that is not as much writing the code but getting your 'plumbing' in order so everything can talk to each other.

Awesome, something about ESP32 popped up on my YT feed the other day.

This does sound like a good route for me. I'm starting fresh so not-so-challenging code to start with sounds appealing. The 'plumbing' challenge I'm up for!

We point people at https://www.py4e.com

It’s very good and free, or there’s a paid for version on Coursera which is the same but a bit slicker. It’s (probably) too basic if you code already, but even then might be worth a look.

too basic if you code already

Thanks. I have a decent grasp of the electronics stuff I did but absolute noob at coding so this is helpful!

I did the Coursera course during Feb to May.

I really enjoyed it, never coded before, but got a grasp pretty quickly.

I am doing the Andrew Ng AI course next.

Cool - that’s good to know. I run a data and analytics team, and we’re frequently asked how to learn python or some of the other stuff we use and support. Py4e has been the default answer for a couple of years!

I believe this is something that could be done through Python but I've got no idea, so please ignore if not:

I'm looking to scrape some data from a significant number of web pages (at least 3,000, I think, all from the same website initially). I'd like different elements of the website to be put into different columns in a spreadsheet. In the HTML, different

attributes separate the different elements. Is this something that could be done, and if so would anyone be able to give me some advice on how? Many thanks!

beautifulsoup or scrapy will be a good starter

Are you sure you need to parse the HTML? Any chance there is an API you can hit instead?

That's the kind of job that if the website is a public one, that asking ChatGPT to give you code examples would actually work.

Then, with those code examples, GitHub CoPilot will be pretty effective at helping tie it all together.

Cheers all. I've got no coding background so this is very helpful. Will put a few hours into trying these different suggestions soon.

https://zapier.com/blog/google-sheets-importxml-guide/