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    Swaroop C H is 27 years of age. He graduated in B.E. (Computer Science) from PESIT, Bangalore, India. He has previously worked at Yahoo! and Adobe.


    Email: swaroop (at) swaroopch.com

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Watching a person learn a skill

I love the moment when you help somebody learn something and they have that sparkle in their eye when they realized they understood it. Here’s one of those virtual sparkles:

Oct 27, 2005:

Decided to abandon “Dive into Python” for the time being, it is REALLY frustrating for me to hanging at chapter 5 without moving forward for so long…. I think it is me, my limitation to understand. So, I decided to surf around the net to look for another tutorial, perhaps a gentler one. Foudn “byte of Python”, 110 pages in all, not too long. So, will give it a go. Hopefully within few weeks, this could equip myself better to go for “Dive into Python” again.

Nov 20, 2005:

Learning Python, still. So far so good, I am on page 85!!! So, that is only 20+ pages to finish it. I consider it a big achievement, hahaha. And, what pleased myself most is that, I finally get through object-oriented programming, hmmm, feel like celebrating already :-)

Nov 25, 2005:

Finished Byte of a Python tutorial, finally. I think the tutorial is good, especially for begineer. But I also think that it is too surface/brief if one really want to take a step further. So the tutorial itself did point out what to do next, where to go for further learning resources.

Dec 2, 2005:

I considered the basic of my contact completed. Now I have function to list out all contacts, add new contacts, delete contacts, and find a contact.

Nothing to shout about really, but the building up of this apps is quite interesting. I just create the barebone of the program to do the basic stuff, then add some validation, or extra functions, like before adding a contact, check if it already exist, if yes, ask whether the user actually want to replace the current one… etc.

Hey, I really enjoy the process. Now I am thinking of the next step, either create a better user interface with some GUI tool, or make it a web application thing. I don’t know if that is over ambitious since this is just the first actual program I wrote in Python, but we will see…

That last part about the contacts program is a task I have suggested to write a program for to test whether the reader has learnt enough about Python.

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4 Responses to “Watching a person learn a skill”

  1. Chirag Gupta Says:

    Seems just like my story! My next step is to create a Matrix manipulation library, learn wxWindows and Image Processing library. Thanx a lot for ur book, It’s probably the first programming book i read till the last chapter.

  2. Ankit Malik Says:

    Yeah! Your book is really really cool and easy to use! I downloaded it last year and read and practiced the first few pages. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I couldn’t go beyond that but whatever I learnt I enjoyed that. Within a couple of hours of reading the first few pages, I was able to create a simple menu- driven program to find area of a triangle/square and stuff. Nothing extraordinary but I was pretty pleased by the progress I could make in a couple of hours from your book! :-) Thanks.

    P.S. Someday, I will get to read and practice it completely! :-)

  3. Avi Says:

    Hi , First of all let me wish you for the good work done in the form of “A Byte of Python” Coming to the point, I work for a Telecom company. We develop Man Machine Interface (MMI) for telecom applications (SMS or a Phonebook for Eg.).How do you think that we can use Python to test such applications. The code is in C++.

    I would like to keep the mail short. Hope to get a reply from u :) Keep up the good work

    Cheers. Avinash

  4. Swaroop Says:

    @Avi,

    I don’t have knowledge of testing of mobile phones, perhaps the Python for Mobile Devices page can give you some ideas.

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