Learn To Code By Solving Problems: A Python Programming Primer

I have had a few false starts in my journey to learn to code, some due to personal circumstances and other due to the study materials.The concept of ‘Learn to code by solving problems’ is a great fit for me. Daniel Zingsro lays out a problem and them walks your through the Python concepts to solve it. That is great but then he give you more problems to solve that use the same concepts from online coding competition websites where you can upload you code and get an instant pass or fail grade.I am not too far into the book yet but so far, it’s really helpful

good

I just finished the NYU python 101 course. This book was very much like the course at college where we learned to code by solving problems. This book uses the exact same approach.According to my father, a professional software engineer, the approach of this book is how all the big tech firms interview their candidates: They present a problem and the candidate tool to solve the problem is code.I highly recommend it for any starting student. I believe this will also help in my future interviews.

It is a very good book! It would strongly help to already be familiar with the concepts first and then dive into this book! I think the problem sets are amazing, challenging and chosen carefully. Only problem I have with the book is that there isn’t a way to get help or find the answers to the recommended problems at the end of each chapter. Otherwise great book! Will get his Algorithms book once I’m done with this one!

Each section begins with a problem that the reader would have no chance of solving, or having any idea of how to go about it, then the various commands needed to solve it are introduced one by one. Finally, the solution is shown. However, for the person for whom all the commands are brand-new, how a person knows how to put them all together in order to solve the problem is not at all clear. "I would never think of coming up with that solution."At the end of each chapter, the reader is referred to a half dozen or so exercises. These are found online and consist of problems that are part of international competitions for students. Some are easily enough solvable, but some are not for people who are barely familiar with the required techniques. They are test questions, not practice questions. Even worse, you are suggested to submit your solutions to the online "judge," which is very thorough. In other words, you may have a solution that works for all the standard cases you have in mind, but the judge tests it against other, non-standard cases, and you may find yourself with no way to see what you did wrong. If this makes you too frustrated, I'd suggest just finding your own solutions and not submitting them to the judge.People who have a knack for "computational thinking" may not run into the difficulties I did. I found it less discouraging to use a book with a more standard approach, that is, with exercises more geared to making you familiar with the techniques of the chapter rather than being challenged at every step of the way.