last updated 2 years ago by gerard #

(update: fixed markup)

Just some more thoughts. Although I really like the style of this new section - informal, chatty, hands-on - it's slightly at odds with the plainer, dryer style of the rest of the tutorial. It feels like it's for a different, less-experienced audience. This fits in with an idea I keep having when reading the wiki - what about two tutorials, a beginners' and an intermediate? I imagine the Beginners tutorial as a kind of 'Python in 24 Hours' - something that someone serious could complete over a weekend, and that would give a good grounding in the basics. Then the Intermediate tutorial would be more in-depth, more real-world - basically the existing tutorial, but without whatever is covered in the Beginners.

Suggested Beginners' Tutorial:

• Audience1 - someone with experience of another language(s) who wants to learn Python from the ground up, possibly no OOP experience
• Audience2 - someone with no programming experience but who doesn't want their hand held and is prepared to roll their sleeves up, maybe a technical/scientific background.
• Using Python as a calculator - basic numeric types and operations, logical operators, precedence
• Strings, lists, dictionaries
• Control flow: if, for, while, range()
• Functions, args/*kwargs
• Introduction to classes/OOP

I understand that there are existing Beginners tutorials but I'm also thinking of this as a 'pruning' operation for this wiki. Obviously it's a big departure from the existing situation, but food for thought at least.

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