Learn Python The Hard Way - a review

Every programming language has some kind of way of doing numbers and math. Don’t worry, programmers lie frequently about being math geniuses when they really aren’t. If they were math geniuses, they would be doing math not writing ads and social network games to steal people’s money.

This is one of the many gems contained in Learn Python The Hard Way, a free book that claims to teach you how to program "the way people used to teach things." It contains 52 exercises (and essentially nothing else), and argues that learning to program is similar to learning to play an instrument - it requires practice and brute repetition of truly monotonous tasks until you're able to easily detect details and spot differences between code.

One of the specific tenets? Do not copy-paste. I find this one to be interesting, as my own history as a computer tinkerer is full of a great deal of copy-pasting and tweaking. This book argues that you should manually retype exercises to condition your brain and hands, much like playing scales and arpeggios is critical to learning an instrument. I see the appeal, and wonder how I would be different if my background was less copy-paste oriented - I still think that copy-pasting reduces the entry barrier to do certain things, allowing you to explore more freely and cover more material. For the purpose of this book though I agree with his "no copy-paste" edict.

So how about the exercises? The book warns that if you know how to program you will find the exercises tedious, and that is true most of the time. I'm not talking "Hello World!" tedious here, but most exercises are very rote and focus on repeatedly manipulating single aspects of the language to understand subtle variations in output. The instructions are to "write, run, fix, and repeat" - not to meander around the language browsing random source code, packages, and other things as most who start programming do.

The exercises finally get a bit freer towards the end (you're supposed to make a simple "choose your own adventure" game), but all in all the book lives up to its title - not really in difficulty, but in strictness and philosophy. It's unfortunate that the humor and appeal of this book will mostly be towards those who already program rather than true "newbies." Both stand to gain from this book, but the latter will be more diligent in working through it as the concepts in the exercises will be new to them. Those with experience programming will skim, skip, and yes, most likely copy-paste, if just to be contrarian.

All in all, this book reminds me in many ways of Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. Both have a sense of humor, and both also have a distinctive and coherent philosophy towards programming and learning. Of course superficially they're quite different, and Why's guide seems to lean more towards the free "play around with things and have fun" approach (I doubt he'd argue for no copy-paste) while the Python book has an almost disciplinary attitude.

Both, though, are fun and educational to read. Abstracting from the books, I still have to recommend Python as more useful than Ruby overall, at least to my knowledge. Ruby is great fun, but is still catching up in terms of speed and scaling while Python can have truly "industry grade" applications. Of course if you're just doing a fun project for yourself it really doesn't matter, but if you're working or seeking employment then Python is probably a better bet (or of course Java/C/C++, but those are all different beasts).