2. More hands-on exercises with Python

This is the second hands-on article in a series of articles. The first article is available here Getting Started With Python. Highly recommend working through that first if you haven't done so already. 

These days there are a plethora of choices to learn something new. Printed books, e-Books, video tutorials on YouTube, MOOC platforms like Coursera, etc. However I have always found product manuals, user and reference guides are the best and most definitive source for learning new languages and technologies. That way you can safely say I have RTFM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM)

The standard Python documentation is a good example of well-written documentation and my personal favorite for both learning and teaching. https://docs.python.org/3.7/  

Looks daunting at first sight, doesn't it? 😀 No worries. The key to avoid being overwhelmed is to know where exactly to start from. I recommend the Tutorial section. The subtitle 'start here' under the Tutorial Link also hints the same.

Let Us Begin

Pre-Requisites: Getting Started With Python. 

1. Click on Tutorial and jump directly to Section 3. An Informal Introduction to Python

2. Open a New Jupyter Notebook on the Google Colab platform. Start to copy/paste commands as shown below and execute each cell using Shift-Enter.

There you have it. You are on your way to learning Python from a definitive source. By completing section 3 you will become familiar with the following core Python concepts.

• Comments in Python
• Basic data-types provided by the language & literal values
• Integer & Floating point numbers
• Strings & characters
• Lists 
• Basic operations on data types
• Basic math on numbers - add, subtract, divide, multiply etc.
• Length of strings & lists len() function
• Slicing syntax to get you parts of lists or Strings
• Few errors with an explanation why they occur
• A basic Fibonnaci generator program

That's all for this post. In the next post, we'll continue this journey of learning Python.