General Note about Programming

Bad News

Bad news is that there is no quick fix to learn programming. Like learning to play a musical instrument, any amount of watching youtube videos, sitting in class or reading a book will be of little help. Like every art form, the art of programming is perfected by practicing, practicing and practicing.

Good News

Good news is that programming sets in muscle memory with practice exactly the same way as one starts to play an instrument almost effortlessly. It does takes time and several hours of frustrating moments (sometimes we get stuck for hours on silly things like importing an external file into the program body only to realize that there was a missing ‘/’ in the path), but you certainly learn it in the end. But that’s perfectly ok and part of learning and I can say it with certainty from my own experience; with a disclaimer that I am by no means a master of the art of programming but I manage to write few codes that serve my purpose without too many bugs.

The famous quote by Newton - ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ is my motivation to recommend few learning resources (most of which have immensely helped me) and by no means this list is exhaustive and I will keep on adding as we go along.

Resources on Python

Just Programming

1.Learn Python the Hard Way: A Very Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Code by Zed A. Shaw

• 2.Automate the Boring Stuff with Python  Practical programming for total Beginners by Al Sweigart

• 3.A Smarter Way to Learn Python: Learn it faster. Remember it longer  by Mark Myers

With Machine Learning

• 1.Deep Learning with Python by François Chollet (creator of Keras)

• 2.Python Machine Learning: Machine Learning and Deep Learning with Python, scikit-learn, and TensorFlow, 2nd Edition By Sebastian Raschka

 

• 3. Machine Learning with Python Cookbook: Practical Solutions from Preprocessing to Deep Learning, 1st Edition By Chris Albon