What I never understand about intros like this (even intro courses in college), is why not start with types? Reading the content, it’s obvious there’s something different between a string and a number, and a list (or a dict) is obviously very different again. You quickly figure out that these things are also capable of doing completely different operations, but why? And what things (methods) are they capable of?

I was helping a friend who decided to start a CompSci degree recently (the 101 course was taught in python), and she was massively struggling with type coercion and understanding type methods. Looking at the course forum, so was everybody else. I helped her understand what types were, why they were important and what the built in type methods were (and how to read the python documentation), and it was a major breakthrough for her. She’s now getting close to 100% on her tests.

I was also blown away by how archaic some of the content was, like using .format() instead of fStrings, but that’s a seperate topic.