Today on Brad Feld’s Amazing Deals I’m bringing you another offer from the online academy Udemy.com. A few months ago, Udemy was responsible for one of my most popular deals to date, a suite of deals relating to startups. Today they are offering your choice of two courses for $75 (normally $250). Pick either Learn to Develop an iPhone or iPad application in 4 weeks or Learn Python the Hard Way. Both courses include multiple videos, lectures, and code examples.
If you were one of the 100+ people that bought the last Udemy deal, I’d love to hear your feedback on the course.
January’s Tech Theme of the Month is going to be Python. I realize it’s still December; I decided to get a head start.
Last month’s tech theme was videoconferencing. I learned a lot, including the unfortunate continued split between low end and high end and general lack of ability to have a single universal solution. Oh – and bandwidth still matters a lot. I expect by the end of January we’ll have much better videoconferencing infrastructure set up at Foundry Group with the single goal of eliminating some travel.
I’ve thought about learning Python for a while. I don’t code much anymore and I regularly find myself wishing I could do something with a simple UI and heavy back-end processing – mostly to move data between web services that I use via the web services APIs. I stopped programming around 1993 although I occasionally had to dive back in and support something that I had previously written until the late 1990’s, when I stopped for good because I simply had no time. As a result, the languages I feel like I have mastery over are BASIC, Pascal, Scheme, and Dataflex and the corresponding environment that I’m comfortable developing in ends with MS-DOS and Novell Netware. While I did stuff in plenty of other languages as a result of courses I took (IBM 370 assembler, SAS, Fortran) or projects I had to figure out (PL/SQL + Oracle, Paradox, dBase), I don’t feel like I did enough with these to claim mastery.
Every couple of years, I fuck around with a new language and environment. PHP is the one that has stuck the best and I can read it and hack around if necessary. But I don’t really like PHP – it feels sloppy and I constantly am having to look up syntax because it’s not comfortable to me. I went through a “ok – I’ll figure out Ruby on Rails” phase a few summers ago but stalled when I realized that Rails wasn’t a particularly practical environment for what I wanted to play around with.
Python may be a miss for me, but when I look at Python code I feel very comfortable with the syntax. A few folks that I know that are like me (e.g. not developers anymore, but were once, and occasionally bust out an IDE to hack on something) swear by Python. But the biggest motivation for me was that 6.01 is now taught using Python.
In 1984, I took 6.001: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. This is the first computer science class most MIT students take. I had written a lot of software, including several commercially released products, almost entirely in BASIC (with a little Pascal and assembly.) 6.001’s programming language of choice was Scheme (a LISP dialect) and working with it was an epiphany for me. I continued to write commercial apps in BASIC and started using a 4GL called Dataflex, but my coding approach was heavily influenced by what I learned in 6.001. The abstractions you could build in BASIC, if you tried, were surprisingly good and Dataflex was a remarkably robust 4GL – very UI constrained, but very powerful (and fast compared to everything else at the time.)
So – if you look at my history, I’m comfortable with imperative languages. I got a good dose of functional programming from MIT but never did anything with it commercially. And I stopped developing software before object-oriented programming became popular. Python feels like a mix of imperative and functional when I look at it and read about it so I’m optimistic that I can use my regular programming muscles without having to fight through the OOP stuff that I don’t really know and doesn’t feel natural to me.
MIT has an IAP course (the MIT January session) titled 6.189: A Gentle Introduction to Programming Using Python. As with many MIT courses, it’s available on MIT OpenCourseWare so I’m going to take the course over the next month and see how it goes.
If you are a Python expert and have any suggestions for sites, tools, or blogs I should pay attention to, please leave them in the comments.