Python Office Hours
Every first and third Thursday of each month at 7pm PS:One holds Python Office Hours. Everyone is welcome, regardless of skill level! Show up and introduce yourself!
Hello someone who might be reading this wiki page while I'm building it. Pardon me while I reorganize!
What is this?
This originally started out as a study group for people working through the same online course. But you don't have to be taking an online course to come to office hours. Perhaps you are curious about programming, or curious about python. Perhaps you have something you want to build and know that python can help.
This is a chance for people to get together for moral support, project assistance, and homework assistance. We’ll have an experienced python developer or two on hand to help answer questions and explain difficult concepts. This is an “office hours” event with volunteer teaching assistants. For students, the expectation is that you watch lectures, read tutorials and attempt homework on your own, then use this as a resource to aid in learning. For people who may not be students but have ideas for projects, the expectation is that you can bounce ideas off of other people in the group for review, and get help with any python bits along the way. If you don't have a project, or aren't taking a class, but are just curious about python, or maybe even about programming in general, then we might be able to help by giving you a starting point to explore.
Curious but don't have a specific question?
If you don't already have something to work on, look through the resources below for something to try.
First, some philosophy. Many people who start learning to program want to know how to get better or want something concrete to work on rather than working through lectures. This blog post, Contributing to Libre software projects, talks about finding Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. When you show up to office hours and see someone you haven't met before, ask them if they are a contributor to any project. Maybe you will find a shared interest.
Here are some starting Points
Start here if
- if you are new to programming, try out the beginner Boston Python Workshop materials
- if you are new to python but know a little about programming, try out the intermediate Boston Python Workshop materials
- you want to do web development
- you want to play with robots
- you want to play with raspberry pi, arduino, etc
- you want to analyze data sets
- you want to write games
Random stuff to get curated
Interactive online tools
- http://www.pythontutor.com/
- http://codingbat.com/python
- http://www.learnpython.org/
- http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/python
Online courses and lectures
- Software Carpentry
- A Gentle Introduction to Python
- Coursera has online courses, search to see if there's a class that uses python, for example, An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python
- CSE 891 Computational Science for Evolutionary Biologists]