The impression for me for python is that it can be scalable and you can really build a full fledge application from it. In the past I used to evangelized on certain language and think that the world is full of philips screws that I can use my philips screwdriver to screw at. I was totally wrong. But generally I think if you are looking at web scripting, PHP is simple to learn and fast to execute; if you want to automate and parse data on the fly, Perl is no doubt; and if you want to build application and not in particular in execution speed, Python is the way to go. I considered myself as a newbie too as I always trying to learn a thing or two, here and there.
The way I learn to program usually I would get one of those open source application written in whatever language I wish to learn and I would study it from ground zero. I would try to understand the programmer style and also try to understand his logic and why he want to do this or that. You may think its crazy but I kinda like to pretend I am a detective trying to solve a case. When you have the right attitude and fun, you will pick up fast. This way you will basically learn everything. Books are good but just don't get sucked into everything. I discovered that in real programming life, 80% of what you apply comes from the 20% of the knowledge you've learn. Just my n cents worth. Pardon my political incorrect grammar if any, as I am not a native english speaker. Mark Sargent wrote: > Hi All, > > I'm taking the plunge into Python. I'm currently following this tutorial, > http://docs.python.org/tut/ > I am not a programmer in general, although I've learnt a bit of bash > scripting and some php/asp. I want to get into python to use it for > Linux/Unix related stuff. A question I have, is, those of you who use it > for the same things, what do you primarily use it for. Could you show me > some examples.? I find the hardest thing with programming, is not > remember the syntax/logic etc, but, when to use it. Perhaps that is also > a personal thing, but, I'd love to see some basic examples out there. > Cheers. > > Mark Sargent. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
