Hacker News Reader

Comment by _3ex7 | Hacker News Reader

I would pay cash for "Learn HTTP the hard way"

I'm running an informal "Learn Python the Hard Way" study session on Tuesdays at Antidote Coffeehouse in Houston with some friends of mine. I have some nerdy non-programmer friends who have long expressed an interest in learning how to program, and we've tried a few different things ("NAND to Tetris" and a a different type-in Python games tutorial) but "The Hard Way" is much better focused on the complete programming newbie. I've also taught Comp Sci 101/102 as a grad school TA. I have to say that "The Hard Way" is markedly better than all the other attempts at a tutorial for the complete programming newb I've seen.

A valuable area to target: Concurrency Optimization. Another: Low-Level Optimization and Memory Hierarchy. Books on these already exist, but Zed has the attention of a large swathe of the programming populace that could really use more awareness on these topics. That potential energy could be converted to book sales or sales of some sort.

I wish I had heard of your group earlier. Are you guys still taking newcomers to your group?

Well, if you want to sit with us at Antidote, there's no reason we would stop you!

EDIT: Translation - sure let's hang out. Seems worth a try. You can send email to this user name at yahoo dot com.

Awesome. I'll shoot you an email when I'm back in town.

Just started with "Learning Python the Hard Way" and would love to join but unfortunatley I'm living in Germany... ;-(

Start your own group. Email me when you have questions.

Thanks a lot. I will!

Hey! This is awesome. Can you do me a favor and take notes on lessons that they screw up, then submit bug reports? I put it out there and then I know people are using it but I don't get any feedback. Short of running my own intro class I can't find any other way to get information on whether it's working.

Either it's working so damn well nobody needs to tell me because they end up writing their next million dollar idea a week later, or it's really not working and people are just not bothering to tell me.

Thanks.

Sure thing, Zed. I'll plant the idea of remembering the stumbling points and generating feedback.

Two of my friends have commented that they really like the snarky humor. I think it's a part of what keeps them chugging through the designed-to-generate-errors-you-must-debug drudgery.

EDIT: Going back over the book, Exercise 0 caused one of my friends some confusion. The other sailed through it just fine. The confused one is a Windows user and hadn't seen the command line since Windows 3.1. The non-confused one has an Ubuntu netbook. Confusion was over what constituted commands to type in and what was the part you should see. The mode switch between the Python prompt and the CMD command line also took a few minutes of explaining.

Ah interesting, yeah I don't have windows so someone else submitted those instructions. I'll go and try to do them myself and see if they can be improved. Although, I think for windows folks this will be a big hurdle at first either way.

As far I know, he was writing a book about writing servers or protocols.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com