I have had many mails over the last couple of weeks, all off the back of the Github Repo I am presuming, the main question I get is how to get started in Python. There are no right answers all people learn differently, but I thought I would write here on how I started.
I have been coding for many years, I am not a programmer but I was always looking at simplifying and automating simple, sometime complex repetitive tasks. I am from a Unix/Linux background and I had always done this with Korn and Bash shell scripts. However I had some free time at work and wanted to learn another language and see if I can learn a language that could be cross platform. From looking around I could see Python becoming a popular language so I started there.
My first thing was to look at some example code, thought it seemed quite simple so I started down the journey. I bought this book, Learning Python 4th Edition from O’reilly.
As I started to review the book, I started on writing little example scripts. Then for me I decided to come up with a good real world example where I could Python to make a difference to my day job as an Sys Admin.
I wish I could remember the first utility script I wrote, but from there I could build on the example scripts I had written to further develop. As soon as you have a couple of scripts that help you can look for other opportunities where you can make improvements, from there you just enhance the scripts and use cases as you get better. Two of my best over the years was to automate an application deployment script, this used to be a manual process which used to take about 25-30 mins per deployment. The script took this down to 7-10 seconds per deployment. The other was my automation of the daily checks we used to have to carry out.
Now this is what worked for me some people learn differently as mentioned, you many prefer to take a course with someone like Udemy, or you may lean by following one of the many tutorials you find on the internet. Stack Overflow is a great resource for help and advice, looking at the repo you can find many examples to follow. My best advice is to try and think of a use case and then work towards that. Although I am not as hands on any more I still use a variety of scripts all the time.
Always happy to help people and advise, and will answer all the mails with requests, however for some, no I will not write your homework assignments for you. So to me the best thing is to write something to scratch your own itch so to speak and start from there.